3605 Posts Found

Subsidiarity… means that power belongs to the lowest possible point in the organization. …Subsidiarity, therefore, is the reverse of empowerment. It is not the center giving away or delegating power. Instead, power is assumed to lie at the lowest point in the organization and it can be taken away only by agreement.

Content: Quotation | Author: Charles Handy | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Power / Authority

If your company quietly allows employees to break some rules with the tacit approval of management, that’s a moral gray zone. And your company is not alone. When rules are broken but privileges are not abused, such unspoken pacts between workers and management can allow both to achieve their respective goals of expressing professional identity and sustaining efforts in positive ways, says HBS professor Michel … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Martha Lagace, Michel J. Anteby | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Ethics, Organizational Behavior

The good news is that in a study of executives, women did better than men on several measures. The bad news is that women fell significantly behind in one key area: vision.

Research by INSEAD professor Herminia Ibarra and PhD candidate Otilia Obodaru shows that women leaders are not perceived to be as strong as men when it comes to articulating a vision of the future … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Herminia Ibarra, Otilia Obodaru | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subject: Women in Business

Unfortunately, a threat that everyone perceives but no one talks about creates more anxiety than a threat that has been clearly identified and made the focal point for the problem-solving efforts of the entire company. That is one reason honesty and humility on the part of top management may be the first prerequisite of revitalization. Another reason is the need to make “participation” more than … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: C.K. Prahalad | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Adversity, Management, Organizational Behavior

In many companies, business unit managers are rewarded solely on the basis of their performance against return on investment targets. Unfortunately, that often leads to denominator management because executives soon discover that reductions in investment and head count—the denominator—“improve” the financial ratios by which they are measured more easily than growth in the numerator: revenues. It also fosters a hair-trigger sensitivity to industry downturns that … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: C.K. Prahalad, Gary Hamel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Compensation, Management, Organizational Behavior

In Mavericks at Work, Fast Company cofounder William C. Taylor and Polly LaBarre, a longtime editor at the magazine, give you an inside look at the “most original minds in business” wherever they find them: from Procter & Gamble to Pixar, from gold mines to funky sandwich shops. Want to stop doing business as usual? Then take some lessons from the 32 maverick companies Taylor … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Authors: Polly LaBarre, William C. Taylor | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Goal setting is one of the most replicated and influential paradigms in the management literature. Hundreds of studies conducted in numerous countries and contexts have consistently demonstrated that setting specific, challenging goals can powerfully drive behavior and boost performance. Advocates of goal setting have had a substantial impact on research, management education, and management practice. In this article, we argue that the beneficial effects of … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Adam Galinsky, Lisa Ordonez, Maurice Schweitzer, Max H. Bazerman | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Brafman and Beckstrom, a pair of Stanford M.B.A.s who have applied their business know-how to promoting peace and economic development through decentralized networking, offer a breezy and entertaining look at how decentralization is changing many organizations. The title metaphor conveys the core concept: though a starfish and a spider have similar shapes, their internal structure is dramatically different—a decapitated spider inevitably dies, while a starfish … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Authors: Ori Brafman, Rod A. Beckstrom | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

For multinational enterprises, the rise of the multi-polar world— a phenomenon in which traditional centers of economic power are being dispersed more widely across the globe—makes global operating model configurations and organizational capabilities more important than ever. However, a recent Accenture survey shows that 95 percent of senior executives say that they doubt that their companies have the right operating model to support their international … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Joshua B. Bellin, Robert J. Thomas, Stéphane J.G. Girod | Source: Accenture | Subjects: International, Organizational Behavior

While hierarchy will always be a feature of human organization, there’s a pressing need to limit the fallout from top-down authority structures. Typical problems include overweighting experience at the expense of new thinking, giving followers little or no influence in choosing their leaders, perpetuating disparities in power that can’t be justified by differences in competence, creating incentives for managers to hoard authority when it should … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Gary Hamel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Management processes often contain subtle biases that favor continuity over change. Planning processes reinforce out-of-date views of customers and competitors, for instance; budgeting processes make it difficult for speculative ideas to get seed funding; incentive systems provide larger rewards for caretaker managers than for internal entrepreneurs; measurement systems understate the value of creating new strategic options; and recruitment processes overvalue analytical skills and undervalue conceptual … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Gary Hamel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Process

Sitting monarchs don’t usually lead revolutions. Yet most management systems give a disproportionate share of influence over strategy and policy to a small number of senior executives. Ironically, these are the people most vested in the status quo and most likely to defend it. That’s why incumbents often surrender the future to upstarts. The only solution is to develop management systems that redistribute power to … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Gary Hamel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Change Management, Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior

We know a lot about how to engender human creativity: Equip people with innovation tools, allow them to set aside time for thinking, destigmatize failure, create opportunities for serendipitous learning, and so on. However, little of this knowledge has infiltrated management systems. Worse, many companies institutionalize a sort of creative apartheid. They give a few individuals creative roles and the time to pursue their interests … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Gary Hamel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior

Transparency is often just as effective as a rigidly applied rule book and is usually more flexible and less expensive to administer.

Content: Quotation | Author: Gary Hamel | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Management, Organizational Behavior

People routinely engage in dishonest acts without feeling guilty about their behavior. When and why does this occur? Across three studies, people justified their dishonest deeds through moral disengagement and exhibited motivated forgetting of information that might otherwise limit their dishonesty. Using hypothetical scenarios (Study 1) and real tasks involving the opportunity to cheat (Studies 2 and 3), we find that dishonest behavior increased moral … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Francesca Gino, Lisa Lixin Shu, Max H. Bazerman | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) | Subjects: Ethics, Organizational Behavior

Many women say, “I have enough money.” I rarely hear a man say that. And it’s because money is different to men and women. I think, for men, money is often a symbol of their power; it’s not for what can they buy. For women, money is not usually how they measure their success. It’s not that they don’t want it; but they want it … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Myra M. Hart | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Money, Women in Business

When you’re not caught up in being right, then you have the ability to listen when an issue comes up – and I mean really listen.

Content: Quotation | Author: Harry Kraemer | Source: Chief Executive | Subject: Communication

Kleiner’s freewheeling portrait gallery focuses on corporate mavericks of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s who pioneered self-managing work teams, responsiveness to customers, grassroots organizing and other ways to imbue corporations with a sense of the value of human relationships. Starting with British management scientist Eric Trist, whose experiments in industrial democracy in the 1940s laid the groundwork for U.S. managerial innovations of the 1980s, Kleiner … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Art Kleiner | Subjects: History, Organizational Behavior

In some ways, corporations are like liberal democracies. The shareholders of a company are like the people in whose interest the enterprise is run. The executive is like the government and the key to making it run successfully are the institutions that provide the checks and balances: the judiciary, the army, and bodies like the Federal Reserve Board in America have their counterparts in the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Amit Varma | Source: European Business Forum (EBF) | Subjects: Accountability, Corporate Governance, Social Responsibility (ESG)

Why is it that many of the same companies appear repeatedly on lists of the best places to work, the best providers of customer service, and the most profitable in their industries? In their new book, The Ownership Quotient, HBS professors Jim Heskett and Earl Sasser and coauthor Joe Wheeler assert the answer lies in recognizing that strong, adaptive cultures can foster innovation, productivity, and … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Earl Sasser, James L. Heskett, Joe Wheeler | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subject: Organizational Behavior