Three Symptoms of a Vulnerable Team
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
The Trouble with One at a Time
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
Ten Reasons People Resist Change
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
The Art of the Imperfect Pitch
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
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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
Getting 360 Degree Reviews Right
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
Is There a Female Leadership Style?
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
When Good Incentives Lead to Bad Decisions
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
How the Best Leaders Build Trust
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
A Revolutionary Approach to Strategic Change
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
Building Organizations That Work
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
Four Traits of Collaborative Leaders
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
Accenture
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
Realizing the Value of People Management
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
How Habits Work (and How They Change)
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
The Power of Potential
Why mere potential can be more impressive than actual achievement.
Content: Article | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Career, Marketing / Sales, Organizational Behavior
Roger Martin and Chris Argyris
Really smart people have the hardest time learning. They are so very smart that they are also very “brittle.” When something goes wrong, rather than reflect on what they might have done to contribute to the error, they look entirely outside themselves for the causes and blame outside forces — irrational clients, impossible time pressure, lack of adequate resources, shifts beyond their control. Rather than … [ Read more ]
Content: Quotation | Authors: Chris Argyris, Roger L. Martin | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Learning, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Personality / Behavior
The Unconscious Executive
Maarten Bos investigates how unconscious processes improve decision-making. Conscious deliberation, it turns out, does not always lead to the best outcomes.
Content: Article | Authors: Maarten Bos, Martha Lagace | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subject: Organizational Behavior
Michael Porter
The highest compliment, I’ve come to understand, is, ‘Oh, that’s obvious.’ “I used to get really mad about that, but now I understand that’s the goal — to take a complex problem and make it seem really clear and obvious.
Content: Quotation | Author: Michael E. Porter | Source: FORTUNE | Subjects: Communication, Problems / Solutions, Trends / Analysis
The Far Reach of Supportive Senior Managers
Leaders at the top have more impact on employee morale and retention than direct bosses do.
Content: Article | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Leadership, Organizational Behavior
