3605 Posts Found

You have heard about how a musician loses herself in her music, how a painter becomes one with the process of painting. In work, sport, conversation or hobby, you have experienced, yourself, the suspension of time, the freedom of complete absorption in activity. This is “flow,” an experience that is at once demanding and rewarding–an experience that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates is one of the most … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

Employees’ personal connections can be as valuable as their individual knowledge base. Social network analysis, or SNA, helps maximize a company’s collective smarts.

Content: Article | Author: Susannah Patton | Source: CIO Magazine | Subject: Organizational Behavior

How can firms understand and appreciate culture without overemphasizing or stereotyping it? Research conducted by Business School faculty members Michael Morris and Itamar Simonson shed new light on this question and uncover how traditional ways of studying cultural influence have led to misconceptions among management and marketing researchers.

Content: Article | Authors: Itamar Simonson, Michael Morris | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: International, Organizational Behavior

An effective organization is vital to success. Yet, Bain & Company research shows that only 15% of companies have an organization that helps them outperform. What separates the winners is the ability to make the most important decisions well-and then to make them happen. The key is not structure but rather an integrated organizational system that aligns five vital attributes-leadership, accountability, people, frontline execution and … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Marcia Blenko, Paul Rogers | Source: Bain & Company | Subjects: Best Practices, Organizational Behavior

An accurate understanding of an organization’s value logic (which can also be thought of as its business model) is critical. Accenture’s research into distinctive capabilities, one of the building blocks of high-performance business, shows that a company’s ability to create a customer-centric “value algorithm” is central to the business’s success. At the highest level, a company’s value logic can provide important insights that enable a … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Jeanne G. Harris, Roland Burgman | Source: Accenture | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Strategy

There is no denying the creativity of someone who can persuade one of the 50 largest private companies in the U.S. to create a position for him called “creative paradox,” or someone who can convince the accounting department of that same company to write off to the company art collection the purchase of more than a dozen roll-top desks to be used in his “creative … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Gordon MacKenzie | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

For any enterprise to succeed, the organization, its strategy and its human resources must be aligned together. Here is a framework that would help managers to understand the need for an organizational structure change. The paper also provides a roadmap for selecting the best structure option and building a plan to implement it. A sample diagram is given only for the managers to ensure that … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Roger T Sobkowiak | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior

The only thing harder than starting something new in a bureaucracy is stopping something old. So the trick is not to ask to start something new — just start it. If you wait and ask for forgiveness for having done something you did not get permission for, you’re much more likely to get away with it than if you go and say, “Can I do … [ Read more ]

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

This content is restricted to site members. Please log in or register

Decision making can often result in managerial missteps, even those decisions that involve ethical considerations. Many common themes emerge as we look at these problematic decisions. Most significantly, various cognitive processes that leaders often unwittingly employ and which may be called “mental gymnastics” or mind games may serve to support and sustain unethical behavior.

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

Most of us prefer being precisely wrong rather than vaguely right.

Content: Quotation | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Personality / Behavior, Thought

The typical mission statement does little more than state the obvious: We’re in the IT business. And that alone isn’t going to motivate anybody or tell them anything new. The problem with typical mission statements is that they define the business of the entire organization. Staff don’t relate to them because they’re too ethereal, vague and grandiose… Effective mission statements define the business of each … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: CIO Magazine | Subjects: Mission, Organizational Behavior

There is a near-universal tradeoff between richness and reach of information. Richness is variously the amount, quality, specificity, recency, or trustworthiness of the information shared in a transaction; and reach is the number of people or entities involved. Typically, we can transact with lots of richness if we are willing to give up reach (a conversation) or with lots of reach if we are willing … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Communication, Information

A force critical to lowering transaction costs is trust. Trust substitutes for search, negotiation, monitoring, and enforcement; it substitues for hierarchical control internally and for the legalisms of contracts externally. The core elements of trust are threefold: reciprocity (the understanding that the parties will deal with each other repeatedly), reputation (the understanding that other potential parties are watching), and a common semantic (a shared language … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Economics, Trust

In general, organizational structure tends to channel and constrain value creation. Structures exist to prvoide formal authority for decisions and to arbitrate when consensus cannot be reached. Those functions are both necessary and valuable. But increasingly, value creation is occurring across structural boundaries through network overlays of one sort or another: functions work with other functions to improve the management of common processes; locations work … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Most companies and government agencies have an organization chart. The vast majority of these charts feature a traditional tree-like structure, and executives will readily admit that the chart does not reveal “how things really work around here.” While they may still rely on their organizational chart for navigation-finding their way around the organization to get work done-most would say the charts are incomplete or totally … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jane C. Linder | Source: Accenture | Subject: Organizational Behavior

The concept of uncertainty provides the basis for a rigorous understanding of power in human behavioral systems. Power is the capability to act in – and on – the system: it is a function of the uncertainties one controls for other members in the system. Actors with power set the rules of the collective game and thus influence the behavior of others. In this way, … [ Read more ]

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

Courage is the human virtue that counts most–courage to act on limited knowledge and insufficient evidence. That’s all any of us have.

Content: Quotation | Source: Zaadz | Subject: Decision Making

Think about the [leadership development] problem along two dimensions-skill and challenge. Ideally, leaders will flourish when their skill set supports them in the challenges they face. If you put people with a lot of skill in a marginally challenging position, they are likely to be bored. When you put that same person in a situation where the challenge is significantly greater than their competence, they … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Graziadio Business Report | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

High emotion contributes to great opera. It does not, however, serve us well when making judgments about others. This is the argument advanced in “Feeling and Believing: The Influence of Emotion on Trust,” a new paper by Maurice E. Schweitzer, Wharton professor of operations and information management, and PhD student Jennifer Dunn. The two researchers show how incidental emotions — emotions from one situation that … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personal Development