3443 Posts Found

When an organization embarks on a change of any magnitude, its leaders tend to think that they are facing a series of operational tasks that will, if executed successfully, result in a new state of being. They don’t realize that they will also have to face an onslaught of emotions and human dynamics. I have come to understand that emotions truly are data and have … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeanie Duck | Source: “Boston Consulting Group (BCG)” | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior

This article presents some practical guidelines for executives seeking to design a high-impact innovation culture. It also outlines four areas of focus that offer a clear path for change, drawing on examples from leading innovators.

Content: Article | Authors: David Blanchard, Deborah Lovich, Hannah Lu Schmitt, Johann D. Harnoss, Justin Manly, Robert Werner | Source: “Boston Consulting Group (BCG)” | Subjects: Culture, Innovation, Organizational Behavior

If you want your values to really matter, you must root them in all organizational decisions. For a company’s values to feel integral to the lifeblood of the organization, they must be visibly central to how the organization competes.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Jarrod Shappell, Ron Carucci | Source: “Harvard Business Review” | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Governance design — which defines who gets to make decisions and allocate resources — is often too complicated or unclear to be effective. For a strategy to be successful, those closest to the most relevant information, budgets, and problems are the best equipped to make decisions. When leaders have proximity to an issue but no authority, authority without the needed resources, or control of the … [ Read more ]

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

Know what your current organization is and isn’t capable of and what capabilities you need to achieve [a] newly articulated strategy. Unlike competencies, which belong to individuals, capabilities are organizational.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Jarrod Shappell, Ron Carucci | Source: “Harvard Business Review” | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Complaining can have both positive and negative effects on organizational communication. Constructive complaining — or structured opportunities for employees to voice their concerns — offers valuable feedback to improve work processes, products, and services, and thus should be encouraged. Venting and chronic complaining have both advantages and disadvantages for the individual and the group and should be given the right space and time, rather than … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Alyson Meister, Nele Dael | Source: “Harvard Business Review” | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

There’s no ideal personality type for executives — but businesses need the right one for success.

Content: Article | Authors: Audrey Kim, Charles O’Reilly, Donald Sull, Xubo Cao | Source: “Stanford University” | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Culture, Organizational Behavior

If you can rely on people to do what they say they’re going to do—without costly coercive mechanisms to make them dependable—a lot of things become possible.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Francis Fukuyama, Jerry Useem | Source: “The Atlantic Monthly” | Subjects: Economics, Organizational Behavior

In The Ethical Algorithm, two University of Pennsylvania professors explain how social values such as fairness and privacy can be designed into machines.

Content: Article | Author: Theodore Kinni | Source: “strategy+business” | Subjects: Ethics, IT / Technology / E-Business, Organizational Behavior, Social Responsibility (ESG)

Where there’s a culture of compliance, where everybody gets paid for coming in on 100 percent of their numbers, there you have a deeply ingrained mindset that aims for safety, not for great. In this case it’s optimizing for personal income, as opposed to optimizing for the acceleration of the organization. There’s real work to overcome the mindset of everybody optimizing for their paycheck, instead … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Deidre Paknad | Source: “McKinsey Quarterly” | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Recently I was surprised to discover that two men whose philosophies I’ve compared and contrasted for years to help explain modern motivation science had a relationship where they did the same thing during their lifetime. We can all benefit from the relationship between Abraham Maslow and Viktor Frankl.

Content: Article | Author: Susan Fowler | Source: “SmartBrief” | Subjects: Human Resources, Motivation, Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

Strong deductive capabilities allow companies to go deep, applying insights from a single source across the enterprise. And strong inductive capabilities allow them to go wide and ask, “What might this outlying piece of data foreshadow?”

Content: Quotation | Authors: Alan Iny, Alison Sander, Hans Kuipers | Source: “Boston Consulting Group (BCG)” | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

The best definition of intelligence — artificial or human — that I’ve found is goal-directed adaptive behavior.

Content: Quotation | Author: Daniel Hulme | Source: “strategy+business” | Subjects: IT / Technology / E-Business, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

One useful way to think about the relationship between culture and strategy is that an effective culture can provide a competitive advantage for a very long time, often much longer than any strategy. This is a particular advantage in a world in which some claim that strategy today confers only short-term competitive advantage.

Content: Quotation | Author: James L. Heskett | Source: “Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge” | Subjects: Culture, Organizational Behavior, Strategy

The consensus in social psychology is that monetary incentives for performance have a detrimental impact on individual performance. Yes, under certain specific and limited conditions, rewards can reduce performance. Yet pay for performance schemes are ubiquitous. How can we resolve this divergence between theoretical recommendations and observed practices? Nirmalya Kumar and Madan Pillutla recommend solving the problem by designing smarter incentives that avoid these detrimental … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Madan Pillutla, Nirmalya Kumar | Source: “Management and Business Review (MBR)” | Subjects: Compensation, Human Resources, Motivation, Organizational Behavior

If you look at the essence of trust, it’s a one-to-one ratio between say and do. If over some period of time, I observe a good ratio of someone doing what they say they will do, they will earn my trust.

Content: Quotation | Author: Andre Durand | Source: “strategy+business” | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Trust

In order to understand the undermining effects of rewards, we must consider how the recipients are likely to interpret them. Specifically, the effects of a reward depend on how it affects the recipient’s perceptions of autonomy and competence. When monetary incentives interfere with an individual’s sense of autonomy or competence, they tend to decrease intrinsic motivation.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Madan Pillutla, Nirmalya Kumar | Source: “Management and Business Review (MBR)” | Subjects: Compensation, Human Resources, Motivation, Organizational Behavior

A company’s culture is frequently at the heart of mismanaged planning, with management often rewarding the wrong behavior. Because financial incentives are still frequently tied to the achievement of short-term plans, employees can feel pressured to negotiate financial goals and to sandbag. Consequently, planning begins to feel like a bazaar instead of the organized, top-down process it should be. Employees may be motivated to reach … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Alexander Roos, Fabrice Roghé, James Tucker, Marc Rodt, Sebastian Stange | Source: “Boston Consulting Group (BCG)” | Subjects: Culture, Management, Organizational Behavior

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