3605 Posts Found

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

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

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

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

If you’ve ever received any cross-cultural training … chances are… it has focused on differences: differences in communication styles (like how Japanese workers are less direct than Germans) or differences in values (like how Americans have more individualistic values than those in China). It may have even focused on differences in etiquette — like how in the United States you can write on the back … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Culture, International, Organizational Behavior

Many companies still operate on the basic assumption that advancement is dependent on the appetite for power. Women by and large are not hungry for power and will not push for it. Corporate cultures that persist in regarding women as being insufficiently ambitious for the top jobs because they don’t display that hunger suffer from a huge blind spot. Unless firms can understand the differences … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Women in Business

Organizations looking for outside talent pay an extraordinary amount of attention to resumes. Once people are inside, it’s almost as if some of kind of reset button is pressed: The details of their backgrounds seem to get dumped onto a far-off slag heap, and they become known only for what they do at the new organization. I call this phenomenon resumenesia — a malady causing … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Eric McNulty | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Because we self-select sites we visit, the Internet pushes people to reinforce their own preconceived ideas and opinions, such that groups solidify more internally due to the attractive forces of common belief but fragment more externally due to the repulsive forces of opposing belief. This mental malignancy metastasizes in two ways: less diversity within groups and more alienation between groups.

Content: Quotation | Author: Robert Lawrence Kuhn | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork, Thought

McKinsey’s survey of global executives finds that corporate culture and a lack of convinced engagement by male executives are critical problems for women.

Content: Article | Authors: Charlotte Werner, Sandra Sancier-Sultan, Sandrine Devillard | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Women in Business