3590 Posts Found

Decision makers struggling with uncertainty can choose from a trio of probabilistic models to match the type of risks they face.

Content: Article | Authors: Saras Sarasvathy, Tim Laseter | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Strategy

There is a simple motivational incentive that is often overlooked: Moving beyond the ‘market contract’ with employees and forging a stronger ‘social contract’.

Content: Article | Author: Scott Keller | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

The human operating system comprises all the behaviors of an organization. It has three basic elements, all of which need to change in most companies. The first is governance: the policies, controls, rules, org charts, goals, and objectives that represent the formal structures of the organization. The second is culture: the values, principles, habits, mind-sets, history, lore, and legends that influence how people behave. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Dov Seidman | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Organizational Behavior

People think that being values-based is about being nice. It’s really about being principled. You have to be firm, consistent, and even ruthless about your principles, and very few companies are.

Content: Quotation | Author: Dov Seidman | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Culture, Organizational Behavior, Values

I have facilitated sessions with CEOs in which I ask, “How many of you could grab your BlackBerry and in the next five minutes produce a list of your top 25 performers?” All the hands go up. Then I ask, “How many, with the same confidence, could produce a list of your most principled or ethical leaders?” Every hand goes down. They all recognize that … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Dov Seidman | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Ethics, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

Karen Sobel-Lojeski at Stony Brook University has studied more than 600 teams and developed a new concept — called “virtual distance” — that measures the perceived isolation of members in a team that relies on electronic communications. Three categories of different factors determine virtual distance.

Content: Article | Author: Keith Ferrazzi | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

New research shows that seeing all your options at once makes you happier with the choice you make.

Content: Article | Author: Baba Shiv | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Organizational Behavior

Leadership is about change, but what is a leader to do when faced with ubiquitous resistance? Resistance to change manifests itself in many ways, from foot-dragging and inertia to petty sabotage to outright rebellions. The best tool for leaders of change is to understand the predictable, universal sources of resistance in each situation and then strategize around them. Here are the ten I’ve found to … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Rosabeth Moss Kanter | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior

Professor Baba Shiv discusses how you can coax risk-averse managers to innovate and introduces the “X Framework.”

Content: Article | Author: Baba Shiv | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Career, Change Management, Innovation, Organizational Behavior

Being right, knowing how to define things, understanding the difference between what is true and false: None of this is the point. What is important is to understand the results of events, not the events themselves. Real intelligence lies not in the individual, but in the evolutionary process — the ongoing process of trial-and-error. In this process, options (essentially, the freedom to experiment with uncertainty) … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Decision Making, Wisdom

There is one thing that profoundly and consistently changes lives — what’s generally referred to as the 360-degree feedback process. Here’s what they do that makes the difference.

Content: Article | Authors: Jack Zenger, Joseph Folkman | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

In recent years, women have been making their way in ever-increasing numbers to the uppermost rungs of the corporate ladder, ascending to leadership positions once occupied almost exclusively by men. All of this got David Matsa, an assistant professor of finance at the Kellogg School of Management, wondering: will women at the top of the corporate world be different sorts of leaders than men are? … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: Kellogg Insight | Subject: Women in Business

New research by Associate Professor Shawn A. Cole, Martin Kanz, and Leora Klapper explores how various compensation incentives affect lending decisions among bank loan officers. They find that incentives have the power to change not only how we make decisions, but how we perceive reality.

Content: Article | Author: Carmen Nobel | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Business leaders face a challenge to keep their firms competitive amid constant turbulence and disruption. Companies such as Borders and RIM have recognized the need for strategic change, but couldn’t drive the organizational change needed to sustain business success.

It often plays out the same: an organization, facing a real threat or eyeing a new opportunity, tries–and fails–to cram through a major transformation using a change … [ Read more ]

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: John P. Kotter | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Most people don’t know how to think about the organizational and societal consequences of low trust because they don’t know how to quantify or measure the costs of such a so-called “soft” factor as trust. For many, trust is intangible, ethereal, unquantifiable. If it remains that way, then people don’t know how to get their arms around it or how to improve it. But the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Stephen R. Covey | Source: LeadershipNow | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

It’s hard to find fault with the concept of equality. To this day, no one in his right mind would ever claim to prefer a stratified social structure to an egalitarian one. Yet, in practice, people sometimes actually favor hierarchical relationships over equal ones, according to a recent study by Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Larissa Z. Tiedens and Emily M. Zitek, an assistant … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: Stanford University | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Zachary Tumin and William Bratton, coauthors of Collaborate or Perish! Reaching across Boundaries in a Networked World, introduce an excerpt about how managers can become collaboration catalysts from The Collaboration Imperative: Executive Strategies for Unlocking Your Organization’s True Potential, by Ron Ricci and Carl Wiese.

Content: Article | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

Trust—defined as expectations set plus expectations met—is critical to customer satisfaction and engagement. Unless expectations are explicitly set customers will come up with their own, based on a collective history of best and worst experiences. And this presents companies with an impossible dilemma: Failed execution against unknown expectations.

Content: Quotation | Source: Accenture | Subjects: Customer Related, Trust

The Boston Consulting Group and the World Federation of People Management Associations (WFPMA) recently conducted major research to probe the relationship between people management capabilities and financial performance. We surveyed 4,288 HR and non-HR managers on their current HR capabilities and challenges, the strategies and approaches they use to address these challenges, and the difficulties they foresee in attracting, managing, and developing people. Our analysis … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Carsten von der Linden, Horacio Quiros, Jean-Michel Caye, Pieter Haen, Rainer Strack | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Best Practices, Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not.

They’re habits. […]

Countless people, from Aristotle to Oprah, have tried to understand why habits exist. But only in the past two decades have neurologists, psychologists, sociologists, and marketers really begun understanding how habits work—and more important, how they change.

Content: Article | Author: Charles Duhigg | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development