3605 Posts Found

The smart aleck employee who prides himself on doing as little as possible to scrape by will needle you by saying, “There are no bad workers–just bad managers.”

Editor’s Note: check out the ten types of bad employees slideshow.

The genius-in-residence has a minor point. But the question remains: How do you motivate employees who don’t perform up to their potential?

Content: Article | Author: Scott Reeves | Source: Forbes | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

The best organizations have the best talent…Financial incentives drive company performance…Firms must change or die. Popular axioms like these drive business decisions every day. Yet too much common management “wisdom” isn’t wise at all but, instead, flawed knowledge based on “best practices” that are actually poor, incomplete, or outright obsolete. Worse, legions of managers use this dubious knowledge to make decisions that are hazardous to … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Authors: Jeffrey Pfeffer, Robert I. Sutton | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Values in teams are the specific beliefs about what is right and wrong around us. Organizational and team values are about the culture we should encourage, the standards we should have, and the principles that should underpin the team’s efforts. They are the essential building blocks of teambuilding.

Over time all other things may change – an organization’s people, strategy, finances, beneficiaries – but its values … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Martin Edwards | Source: LeaderValues | Subject: Organizational Behavior

New research shows that women managers outperform men in almost every management dimension. For women financial managers, this can translate into increased faith in their ability to climb to the top. The message for men is twofold: a call to develop their leadership skills and to recognize that their companies have a superior resource that is tremendously underutilized.

Content: Article | Author: Shari Caudron | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subject: Women in Business

Visionary in scope, Intellectual Capital is the first book that shows how to turn the untapped knowledge of an organization into its greatest competitive weapon. Thomas A. Stewart demonstrates how knowledge-not natural resources, machinery, or financial capital-has become the most important factor in economic life. Through practical advice, stories, and case histories, Stewart reveals how organizations and individuals can create and use the knowledge assets … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Thomas A. Stewart | Subjects: Knowledge Management, Organizational Behavior

Examine a business situation gone bad and there is a good chance you will find, somewhere in the chain of failure, an executive who did not listen. The executive was told but never heard.

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Communication

Many organizations suffer a disconnect between strategy formulation and its execution. The answer? HBS professor Robert S. Kaplan and colleague Andrew Pateman argue for the creation of a new corporate office.

Content: Article | Author: Martha Lagace | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Strategy

A company today is made up of six kinds of capital. There’s the financial capital, the structural capital and the intellectual capital, all of which we understand pretty well. Yet I don’t believe those things by themselves create wealth. Those are actually almost inanimate. And it’s a complete mistake to say that knowledge is the most critical resource in the New Economy. Knowledge today is … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subject: Organizational Behavior

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People tend to think of diversity as simply demographic, a matter of color, gender, or age. However, groups can be disparate in many ways. Diversity is also based on informational differences, reflecting a person’s education and experience, as well as on values or goals that can influence what one perceives to be the mission of something as small as a single meeting or as large … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Gregory Northcraft, Karen Jehn, Margaret Neale | Source: Stanford University | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Do you let ego and basic survival instincts dictate your workplace behavior? Are co-workers playing destructive power games that undermine your efforts? Being territorial isn’t always all bad, but if taken too far, it can work against you in today’s collaborative team environment.

Content: Article | Author: Carol Orsag Madigan | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subject: Organizational Behavior

What type of employee becomes a whistleblower? What type of company culture promotes whistleblowers? How should the company respond once a whistleblower steps forward? Can a silent employee be just as damaging as an employee who speaks out? These are relevant questions with serious consequences in today’s business climate.

Content: Article | Author: Ariane David, Ph.D. | Source: Graziadio Business Report | Subjects: Ethics, Management

Developing high potentials to take on key senior leadership roles is complex and challenging for organizations – beginning with how to define “high potential.” Most organizations can identify, with varying degrees of formality, their short list of likely future senior leaders. But, by definition, the characteristics of these high potentials are illusive. How do you recognize promise, or know it when you see it? This … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Ellen Foley | Source: Forum | Subjects: Leadership, Organizational Behavior

In many of the management teams I’ve studied, an unwillingness to disagree has proved a problem. This seems to be the general pattern. It’s more difficult to draw people out than to control. Within a team there is a sort of natural policing that goes on which means excessive combativeness usually isn’t tolerated. On the other hand there are no sanctions … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Emerald Now | Subject: Teamwork

In business, where sins of commission (doing something) tend to be punished much more severely than sins of omission (doing nothing), the status quo holds a particularly strong attraction.

Content: Quotation | Sources: Harvard Business Review, The Hidden Traps in Decision | Subject: Organizational Behavior

The tone and content of dialogue shapes people’s behaviors and beliefs – that is, the corporate culture – faster and more permanently than any reward system, structural change, or vision statement I’ve seen.

Content: Quotation | Sources: Conquering a Culture of Indecision, Harvard Business Review | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Facts and evidence are great levelers of hierarchy. Evidence-based practice changes power dynamics, replacing formal authority, reputation, and intuition with data. This means that senior leaders – often venerated for their wisdom and decisiveness – may lose some stature as their intuitions are replaced, at least at times, by judgments based on data available to virtually any educated person. The implication is that leaders need … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Sources: Evidence-Based Management, Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior

Even in companies respected for their decisiveness, there can be ambiguity over who is accountable for which decisions. As a result, the entire decision-making process can stall, usually at one of four bottlenecks: global versus local, center versus business unit, function versus function, and inside versus outside partners.

…Cross-functional decisions too often result in ineffective compromise solutions, which frequently need to be revisited because the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Sources: Harvard Business Review, Who Has the D? | Subject: Decision Making

A good story and a well-formed argument are different natural kinds. Both can be used as means for convincing another. Yet what they convince of is fundamentally different: arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness. The one verifies by eventual appeal to procedures for establishing formal and empirical proof. The other establishes not truth but verisimilitude.

Content: Quotation | Source: Storytelling: Passport to Success in the 21st Century | Subjects: Communication, Persuasion

Contrary to popular belief, your decisions don’t drive your long term success – your decisiveness does. Said another way, when you reach a crossroads on any issue, the act of choosing creates power, not the choice itself. The issue is momentum. No matter what you choose, when you commit boldly with conviction, you create momentum. When you hesitate you don’t. And success is built on … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Fast Company | Subjects: Decision Making, Power / Authority