3605 Posts Found

Unlike pay and other financial rewards, being praised and recognized is an expression of care, and this—and not money—affects the hearts in people. Here are five habits leaders must develop in order to maximize the effect of recognition and thereby derive its greatest benefits.

Content: Article | Author: Mark C. Crowley | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Motivation, Organizational Behavior

Companies clearly need a better way to manage complexity. In our work with clients and in our research, we believe, we’ve found a different and far more effective approach. It does not involve attempting to impose formal guidelines and processes on frontline employees; rather, it entails creating an environment in which employees can work with one another to develop creative solutions to complex challenges. This … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Yves Morieux | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

In most firms, incentives are tied to company or business unit performance. The consequences of large investment decisions typically take too long to materialize to have an impact on an executive’s bonus or promotion. This can lead to moral hazard, especially when managers expect to move on after a couple of years in a position.

We recommend tying personal targets and incentives to the success of … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Sebastian Stange, Ulrich Pidun | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Accountability, Compensation, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

Much of the work done at Google, and in many organizations, is done collaboratively by teams. The team is the molecular unit where real production happens, where innovative ideas are conceived and tested, and where employees experience most of their work. But it’s also where interpersonal issues, ill-suited skill sets, and unclear group goals can hinder productivity and cause friction.

Following the success of Google’s … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: re:Work | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

An organization is nothing more than a living embodiment of a strategy. That means its “organizational hardware” (i.e., structures, processes, technologies, and governance) and its “organizational software” (i.e., values, norms, culture, leadership, and employee skills and aspirations) must be designed exclusively in the service of a specific strategy. Research suggests that only 10% of organizations are successful at aligning their strategy with their organization design. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Jarrod Shappell, Ron Carucci | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Strategy

People generally need two types of information to achieve top performance. The first is clear direction: What is the target, and why is it important? (In other words, the What’s Important Now) The second is performance feedback: Am I hitting the target? Am I doing it right?

Content: Quotation | Author: Liz Wiseman | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

The best leaders cultivate a climate that is both comfortable and intense. They remove fear and provide the security that invites people to do their best thinking. At the same time, they establish an energizing, intense environment that demands people’s best efforts.

What occurs when you create only one of these conditions? What happens when you stretch people without first building a foundation of safety, trust, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Liz Wiseman | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

A business ecosystem is a dynamic group of largely independent economic players that create products or services that together constitute a coherent solution.

This definition implies that each ecosystem can be characterized by a specific value proposition (the desired solution) and by a clearly defined, albeit changing, group of actors with different roles (such as producer, supplier, orchestrator, complementor). The definition excludes some of the more … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Martin Reeves, Maximilian Schüssler, Ulrich Pidun | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Business Model, General, Management, Organizational Behavior, Strategy

Too often, leaders […] create a laundry list of the traits and characteristics they aspire to see in their company, and then try to retrofit how people work to fit those goals. But that isn’t how people behave, nor is it how cultures evolve. Some elements in a culture will support a specific strategic play, and others will undermine it.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Carolin Oelschlegel, DeAnne Aguirre, Varya Davidson | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Culture, Organizational Behavior

Whether you’re being interrupted in meetings or challenged at every turn, Amy Gallo shares tactics for getting value out of difficult work relationships.

Content: Article | Authors: Amy Gallo, Roberta Fusaro | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

The purpose of structure is to distribute decision-rights in a rational way. A good structure reflects the hierarchy of the main tasks the organization has to carry out, and there is clear accountability for decision-making at each level. Good processes ensure that everyone knows how the organization works, so that they can devote their energies to dealing with the chaos on the outside. To deal … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Stephen Bungay | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

The exclusive focus on monetary rewards inevitably leaves organizations fighting a fierce but losing struggle to balance individual and team results. Rewarding high performers serves the imperatives of accountability and excellence but can undermine alignment and cooperation among team members. Yet basing pay on team results in order to incentivize collaboration often ends up inadvertently rewarding subpar individual performance and penalizing individual excellence. Neither approach … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Fred Kofman, Sally Helgesen | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Compensation, Human Resources, Motivation, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

Here’s how to balance psychological safety and intellectual honesty for better team performance.

Content: Article | Author: Nathan Furr | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Culture, Innovation, Organizational Behavior

Cities enjoy very long lives and keep growing in part because they become ever more diverse with increased size, which helps foster endless cycles of innovation. Companies, by contrast, tend to have a shorter, more defined life span. Successful companies focus on what they do best, casting aside fringe people and fringe projects that don’t fit the mission. But that laser-like concentration on the core … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Geoffrey West, Lawrence M. Fisher | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Improving employees’ experience of inclusion in the workplace is one of the most actionable levers companies have to attract and retain talent. When done right, inclusion can slash attrition risk in half.

In today’s fiercely competitive environment, inclusion is akin to a hidden superpower, so why do so few companies view it as a business necessity? The answer is simple: workplace inclusion is hard to define, … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Alex Zborowski, Ashley Dartnell, Gabrielle Novacek, Gretchen May, Mario Farsky, Nadjia Yousif, Seema Bansal | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Diversity, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

So what happens when we automate our most impactful and superior cognitive capacity—thinking—and we don’t think for ourselves? I think we end up not acting in very smart ways, and then the algorithms are trained by behaviors that have very little to do with intelligence. Most of the stuff we spend doing on a habitual basis is quite predictable and monotonous and has very little … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Organizational Behavior

One of the biggest challenges facing organizations today is the need to be agile. To achieve this goal, leaders must seek a deeper understanding of the power of social interaction in furthering the flow of ideas, information, and insight. Michael Arena explains how building relational structures that foster 4D connections, discovery, development, diffusion, and disruption, can usher in the new, innovative ideas and concepts necessary … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Michael J. Arena | Source: Management and Business Review (MBR) | Subjects: Innovation, Organizational Behavior

Research shows that using feedback is how organisms — and organizations — stay alive. Here’s how leaders can make the most of the anxiety-producing process.

Content: Article | Authors: Beth Jones, Chris Weller, David Rock | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Organizational Behavior

In this INSEAD Knowledge podcast, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour Mark Mortensen proposes a more holistic approach to understanding employees’ needs, while offering practical solutions to ensure that they remain fully invested in their organisation and its goals.

Content: Multimedia Content | Authors: Mark Mortensen, Nick Measures | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

What we found is teams with psychological safety and a supportive work environment actually benefit from being edgy and pushing to do better. But you put that same edge, that same kind of push, on a team that doesn’t have psychological safety or an open and supportive work environment, and it has the opposite effect. It actually makes the team go into a sort of … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Aaron De Smet | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork