3605 Posts Found

Over the last 100 years, four distinct contexts of business leadership have emerged in the West: paternal-mechanistic, humanistic, holistic, and spiritual-based. Each context represents a fundamental change in how we view the nature of business leadership. As we embrace and fulfill these contexts of business leadership, we believe it will naturally fuel a fundamental change in the nature of business itself, such that business and … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Debra Ruth Miller, William C. Miller | Source: Global Dharma Center | Subject: Organizational Behavior

What I’ve learned about business owners and human beings is that they respect wisdom but obey pain.

Content: Quotation | Source: BusinessWeek | Subjects: Personality / Behavior, Wisdom

Things bring people together. They oblige them to interact, and to enter into exchanges. Every day, organisations and institutions of all sorts are formed around things. Things create social situations that, in some cases, their participants are no more than dimly aware of and, in others, use ruthlessly to their advantage. Thus things take on a “social density”, contributing to and reinforcing certain kinds of … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: European Business Forum (EBF) | Subject: Organizational Behavior

An organisation’s unwillingness to change comes from the myopia of its leadership. An inability to change, on the other hand, comes from its processes.

Companies can be classified according to these two dimensions. Captive companies are those that are willing but not able to change. Arrogant companies have the ability to change, but are unwilling to do so. Legacy companies are neither willing nor able … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: European Business Forum (EBF) | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior

Women executives who leave the corporate world when they hit a glass ceiling, want to raise a family fulltime or decide to focus on other interests, encounter frustrating roadblocks in their attempts to re-enter the workforce, according to new Wharton research. To overcome the obstacles, women should confront the difficulties they face and prepare for their return to the labor force the moment they leave, … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subject: Women in Business

David West proposes that a key distinction exists between those who seek to control time and those who are willing to respond to it (Monochrons vs. Polychrons).

Content: Article | Author: David West | Source: TheWorkingManager.com | Subjects: Miscellaneous, Organizational Behavior

Empowerment can be abandonment when employees are given responsibility without guidance or training. A vice president who suddenly shows up one day and tells his plant manager that he will have sign-off authority for $1 million instead of the $5,000 he formerly had isn’t empowering his employee, he’s setting him up to fail.

Content: Quotation | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

Twenty years ago, a fortysomething man didn’t feel the immense pressure to be a great dad that he feels today. If you were a C-suite executive and had kids at home, taking care of them was the job of your wife, community, school, church, and the Little League coach. And people were OK with that. Societal expectations weren’t that you were going to spend thirty … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Across the Board (ATB) | Subject: Women in Business

Get away from the grand eloquence and echoing emptiness of the conventional mission (or vision or values) statements. Make them more than buzzwords to really mean something to employees’ day-to-day.

Content: Article | Author: N. Dean Meyer | Source: CIO Magazine | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Four steps to ensure that the right decisions are made by the right people.

Content: Article | Authors: Michael C. Jensen, Peter Jacobs | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Once an organization decentralizes, localized decision-making restores diversity of opinion and offers the opportunity to tap into a wide body of knowledge. But there’s a problem: How do you aggregate that knowledge? Similar to the issues created by a competitive internal culture, the transfer of power away from the center toward the frontline employees often results in local knowledge not being shared throughout the organization. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Across the Board (ATB) | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Many managers believe that a good corporate culture can encourage employees to share their opinions and solve the diversity requirement, but with few exceptions corporate cultures work against the sharing of dissimilar ideas. In the competing schools of thought on culture — team versus competitive — both models embody elements that undermine collective intelligence. The team concept, based on fostering familiarity and friendly cooperation between … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Across the Board (ATB) | Subjects: Culture, Organizational Behavior

At a time when many corporations are engaged in unrelenting searches for ways to improve operations and reduce costs, there is one aspect of organizational life that has largely escaped scrutiny: Performance Appraisal. Perhaps this is because performance appraisals have become an unquestioned fact of life in most large organizations. As with most unquestioned facts, a critical examination can prove beneficial.

In this article, the author … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Fred Nickols | Source: Corporate University Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

This article discusses the statement: It is possible to speed up corporate growth – but not infinitely. Today start-up, tomorrow at the stock exchange – this is impossible for some practical reasons. The question is, however, how fast an organization can develop from start-up with a team of five to a business with 50+ people. For this discussion, Greiners model of Five Phases of … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Oliver Recklies | Source: TheManager.org | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Today business, politics, education, and society in general are driven by four negative motivations: fear, greed, anger, and self-assertion. When we are controlled by these negative emotions, we trust both ourselves and others less, and we tend to act from a small place inside ourselves.

Content: Quotation | Source: Leader to Leader | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

When it comes to ongoing, steady business, you need deep and meaningful relationships. This can be very reassuring. The problem, of course, is that these close contacts know the same people, have the same information, and often have the same views and opinions.

But when it comes to ideas, creativity and thinking outside the box, each of us must have a diverse range of distant contacts. … [ Read more ]

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

When one person speaks and is encouraged to develop his or her ideas, then it is we, the audience, who provide the challenge. We provide the democracy. In each of our hearts and minds, we absorb, judge and come to our own conclusions. The dialectic is, thankfully, not between a group of equally ignorant people thrashing out a series of arbitrary subjects about which they … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Guardian Unlimited | Subject: Communication

At the heart of the strengths revolution is a simple decree: The great organization must not only accommodate the fact that each employee is different, it must capitalize on these differences. It must watch for clues to each employee’s natural talents and then position and develop each employee so that his or her talents are transformed into bona fide strengths.

Content: Article | Authors: Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D., Marcus Buckingham | Source: Gallup Management Journal | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

The importance of leadership is a recurring theme within the business ethics literature, and top executives have been shown to have a great impact when it comes to establishing the ethical tone of an organization. However, if ethical leaders help to inspire ethical organizations, who will inspire those leaders? How can one develop business leaders for this new millennium who can embrace and demonstrate an … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Ken Peattie | Source: Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) | Subjects: Ethics, Miscellaneous

You cannot fight norms solely with laws. You need to fight norms with other norms.

I think that our culture is biased toward laws and rules. Cultures work best when there’s a thick layer of moral norms – shared values and habits of behavior – undergirded by a relatively thin base of law. In the United States, we’re over-lawyered, overregulated, and under-normed. We’re attempting to deal … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Ethics, Personality / Behavior