3605 Posts Found

Psychologists know false stories thrive in situations of heightened anxiety. Chip Heath, a Stanford-trained psychologist, is doing research to try and explain why, in more normal times, people tell each other rumors and urban legends on a day-to-day basis.

Content: Article | Author: Chip Heath | Source: Stanford University | Subject: Organizational Behavior

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Behaviors are the solutions people find to deal with their problems, given their resources and constraints. Treat with suspicion any explanations alluding to people’s irrationality or to their “mentality.” These are tautological explanations at best. What is necessary is to understand the problems (operational challenges, personal goals or aspirations), resources (skills, power, interpersonal network), and constraints (dependence on others, rules to abidy by) fromthe employee’s … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

Cooperation always improves, without added metrics or incentives, when poor cooperation becomes a constraint for those who do not cooperate – when they cannot externalize the consequences of poor cooperation to third parties. And engagement always imporves when better performance becomes a means, or a resource, to attain one’s own goals and aspirations.

Content: Quotation | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior

One of the messages of reengineering is that companies, once structured as hierarchical pyramids, now need to be “turned on their sides” and restructured as horizontal organizations. The logic for this restructuring flows from the logic for reengineering: if processes, not functions, are the correct way to organize work, then horizontally must be the correct way to organize a company. It seems obvious. And it … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Jill E. Black, Philippe J. Amouyal | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Organizational Behavior

The suddenly hot topic of corporate governance is further deepened in this title, a collection of columns on business ethics first published in The New York Times. The broad categories tackled here include corporate ethics, policies, hiring, bosses, privacy, “lying, cheating, and stealing,” and leading by example. The strength in this collection is the real-word examples, bolstered by interviews with people involved in an issue … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Jeffrey Seglin | Subjects: Ethics, Social Responsibility (ESG)

In the early stages of your career, you build advancement through your expertise, but as you get higher, more and more of what you do is managing. As that shift occurs, charisma becomes more important. The more your job requires an ability to motivate and inspire, an ability to bring about change, the more helpful it is to have charisma.

Content: Quotation | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Career, Organizational Behavior

People are too complex to understand without their cooperation, and they are too difficult to change without their permission.

Content: Quotation | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Change Management, Personality / Behavior

Toxic leadership is a growing – and costly — phenomenon. Yet individuals and organizations can stop the insidious spread of toxicity, by understanding why we are seduced by the false promises of toxic leaders, and by setting up organizational defence mechanisms to counter the creep of toxicity.

Content: Article | Author: Jean Lipman-Blumen | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Leadership, Organizational Behavior

Decision…is an act of imagination, it is a choice amongst the products of imagination. …decision is wholly concerned with the future. Thus, decision cannot be choice of facts.

Content: Quotation | Source: LOK Conference | Subject: Decision Making

The capacity of human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared to the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world – even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality.

Content: Quotation | Author: Herbert Simon | Subjects: Decision Making, Economics

Utilize tacit knowledge for innovation and problem solving through effective team leadership.

Editor’s Note: applies the Nonaka and Takeuchi knowledge creation process to teams.

Content: Article | Authors: Miriam Y. Lacey, W. Scott Sherman | Source: Graziadio Business Report | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Healthy companies are hard to mistake. Their managers have access to timely information, the authority to make decisions, and the incentives to act on behalf of the organization. The organization, in turn, carries out those decisions. We call these organizations “resilient,” because they can react nimbly to challenges and respond quickly to those they can’t dodge. Unfortunately, most companies are not resilient: Fewer than 20 … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Bruce A. Pasternack, Gary L. Neilson, Karen E. Van Nuys | Sources: Harvard Business Review, strategy+business | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Zaadz | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

Traditional organizational structures, whether designed around functions, products, or geographies; whether centralized or decentralized, can’t cope with the complexity that global operations entail. Matrix arrangements, while explicitly designed to manage complexity, too often end up just adding to it. Managers need new ways to think about molding their international organizations, simply and flexibly, to the needs of their customers and the imperatives of their business … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Mark Blaxill, Xavier Mosquet | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Few psychological forces in organizational life have an impact that compares to those caused by the human inclination to become part of an elite US, and to elevate that group’s status (as well as one’s own) by diminishing THEM. Power, bestowed on bosses by their employing organizations, appears to be too great a temptation. It seduces bosses into using incivility as a means of venting … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

Robert Jackall’s Moral Mazes offers an eye-opening account of how corporate managers think the world works, and how big organizations shape moral consciousness.

Based on extensive interviews with managers at every level of two industrial firms and of a large public relations agency, Moral Mazes takes the reader inside the intricate world of the corporation. Jackall reveals a world where hard work does not necessarily … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Robert Jackall | Subjects: Ethics, Organizational Behavior

It is dangerous and downright irresponsible to prescribe management practices without addressing two types of questions. First, what problem does the practice address, what are its causes, and how does the prescription remedy these causes? Second, and more pragmatically, how does an executive detect the symptoms of the problem in order to know if and how extensively they should use the practice, or whether they … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

The five most cited reasons for alliance failure are each the direct consequence of cultural mismatch. This is not to suggest that cultural differences doom a prospective alliance. Strategic alliances, after all, are formed to unite culturally different partners in pursuit of a common objective. Successful alliance leaders manage the relationship in the context of the partner’s cultural differences, finding ways to create value from … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Pablo C. Biggs | Source: Strategic Triangle | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Strategy

A lot of people are sort of living a lie, they’re doing things they don’t really believe in because they feel they have to, and that’s very uncomfortable actually… you sort of hate yourself for doing it… and it’s very bad for morale, very bad for productivity. I think that one of the talents of leadership is to make that happen as little as possible.

Here … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Charles Handy | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Career, Organizational Behavior