3590 Posts Found

In the past decade, there has been much enthusiasm for the idea that behavioral change interventions are most effective when they focus exclusively on enhancing people’s inherent strengths, as opposed to also addressing their weaknesses. Although there are no reasons to expect the fascination with strengths to wane any time soon, organizations — and people — would be better off if it did. There are … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

Today’s organizations were simply never designed to change proactively and deeply—they were built for discipline and efficiency, enforced through hierarchy and routinization. As a result, there’s a mismatch between the pace of change in the external environment and the fastest possible pace of change at most organizations. If it were otherwise, we wouldn’t see so many incumbents struggling to intercept the future.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Gary Hamel, Michele Zanini | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior

Organizational restructuring is no longer the answer—if it ever was—to the most difficult problems of shifting organizational focus. Indeed, the shape of the organization chart is less and less relevant to their solution.

Content: Quotation | Author: Tom Peters | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Given a realistic commitment to implementation, structural reorganization along functional or divisional lines has worked out successfully in many companies. This is to be expected, since the concepts of functional dominance and product-line autonomy are fair approximations of what actually goes on in functional and divisional organizations respectively. Indeed, in the latter case the structure often fits the basic strategy like a glove; hence its … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Tom Peters | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

A … key engagement driver is the need for continuous and ongoing recognition. As soft as it seems, saying “thank you” is an extraordinary tool to building an engaged team. We studied this topic and found that “high-recognition companies” have 31 percent lower voluntary turnover than companies with poor recognition cultures. These companies build a culture of recognition through social reward systems (tools that give … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Josh Bersin | Source: Deloitte Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

The NYU social psychologist says that the ethical risks for a business depend on its ingrained cultural attitudes.

Content: Thought Leader | Authors: Ann Graham, Jonathan Haidt | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Ethics, Organizational Behavior

Psychology tells us that the one sure way to shut off all perception is to flood the senses with stimuli. That’s why the manager with reams of computer output on his desk is hopelessly uninformed. That’s why it’s so important to exploit the computer’s ability to give us only the information we want—nothing else. The question we must ask is not, “How many figures can … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Decision Making, Information, Knowledge, Thought, Trends / Analysis

For any knowledge worker, even for the file clerk, there are two laws. The first one is that knowledge evaporates unless it’s used and augmented. Skill goes to sleep, it becomes rusty, but it can be restored and refurbished very quickly. That’s not true of knowledge. If knowledge isn’t challenged to grow, it disappears fast. It’s infinitely more perishable than any other resource we have … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Knowledge, Management, Organizational Behavior

If your organizational culture has these five characteristics, all attempts to implement strategic change will likely be doomed.

Content: Article | Author: Quy N. Huy | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Change Management, Management, Organizational Behavior, Strategy

What makes a Google team effective? Over two years we conducted 200+ interviews with Googlers and looked at more than 250 attributes of 180+ active Google teams. We were pretty confident that we’d find the perfect mix of individual traits and skills necessary for a stellar team—we were dead wrong. Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Julia Rozovsky | Source: re:Work | Subject: Organizational Behavior

By now there are hundreds of examples … in which analytics involving the most traditional of data sources outperform traditional modes of decision-making. …

Each case … involves “sorting” or “prioritization” decisions that (a) are central to an organization’s operations; (b) are made repeatedly, typically by experts relying on professional judgment in varying degrees; and (c) incorporate quantifiable information that is readily available, yet commonly used … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jim Guszcza | Source: Deloitte Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior, Trends / Analysis

Anita Woolley of Carnegie-Mellon University and her collaborators constructed a measure of collective intelligence and found that it is roughly as predictive of group performance as IQ is of individual performance. Surprisingly, collective intelligence is not explained by factors such as group satisfaction, cohesion, or motivation. Instead, the strongest predictors of collective intelligence—and group success—are equality of conversational turn-taking (measured using sociometric data) as well … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jim Guszcza | Source: Deloitte Review | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, the Nobel Prize-winning founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman … writes of two fictitious mental processes that he calls System 1 (“thinking fast”) and System 2 (“thinking slow”). System 1 mental operations are rapid and automatic; they are biased toward belief and confirmation rather than analysis and skepticism; they tend to jump to conclusions and infer causal relations based on … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Daniel Kahneman, Jim Guszcza | Source: Deloitte Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior, Thought, Trends / Analysis

I recently came across some eloquent advice from Tufts University philosopher Daniel C. Dennett. He offers four useful insights that help inform collaboration, negotiation, and conflict resolution in organizational settings.

Content: Article | Author: Eric McNulty | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Research in behavioral economics and behavioral operations offers ample evidence that humans frequently make poor choices in the face of uncertainty. Whereas classic economic theory suggests individuals make decisions under risk by calculating an “expected value” (that is, the average value or “utility” of all the possible outcomes weighted by their probabilities), extensive analysis of actual behavior shows systematic violation of this rule and suggests … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Geri Gibbons, Maria Ibanez, Mark Cotteleer | Source: Deloitte Review | Subject: Decision Making

We’ve all got so many different things in us, so many different potentials in us, but the modern world responds and rewards specialization, people who know how to zero in on a particular thing. The ideal sweet spot is that you’re very interested in a specialized bit of the world that society needs but where there are few other competitors, and you can draw a … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Alain de Botton | Source: Deloitte Review | Subjects: Career, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

We live in a world partly driven by the ideology of the United States that is very forward-looking, very optimistic, very much placing the emphasis on individual achievement and the possibilities that are open to everyone so long as they work hard, which is a beautiful philosophy of life but also a very punishing one. It places huge responsibility on the individual to perform and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Alain de Botton | Source: Deloitte Review | Subjects: Career, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Personality / Behavior

When individuals’ rankings of workplace motivators are compared to rankings of what their managers think motivates them, the results reflect how most individuals feel: managers simply do not know what moti- vates their people. Why the big disconnect?

One reason is that leaders depend on their observations of external behaviors and conditions to evaluate their employees’ motivation. Unfortunately, many leaders are not perceptive observers, nor … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Susan Fowler | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Motivation, Organizational Behavior

Power undermines people’s psychological needs. It’s not just your use of the power; it’s people’s perception that you have it and could use it. Your power demands that people need to exert more energy self-regulating to experience autonomy, relatedness, and competence.

Content: Quotation | Author: Susan Fowler | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior, Power / Authority

There are two basic types of trust: cognitive trust and affective trust. Cognitive trust is based on the confidence you feel in another person’s accomplishments, skills and reliability. This is trust from the head. Affective trust on the other hand, arises from feelings of emotional closeness, empathy or friendship. This type of trust comes from the heart. In all … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Erin Meyer | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: International, Organizational Behavior