Increasing supply chain resilience against disruptions and interruptions depends not only on cooperation among supply chain partners but also on cross-functional cooperation within the companies in the supply chain.
Decision fatigue, a mental state that occurs after extended periods of making streams of decisions, influences decision makers to favour less-taxing “default” decisions. A new study, based on data from the banking sector, reveals the cost of such decisions, highlighting the importance of addressing decision fatigue.
A new paper explodes the concept of the craft organization of work as musty history, presenting different configurations of craft that can offer solutions to challenges faced in the 21st-century workplace.
Personalized ads can sometimes repel consumers rather than attract them. A new study reveals the complex psychological mechanisms and other factors that impact the success of tailored marketing. A key success factor: convincing the consumer to spend time critically thinking about your message.
A qualitative study, based on interviews and roundtable discussions with 79 women in the financial sector, identifies 10 action steps companies can take to encourage and enable women to overcome gender barriers to promotions and leadership positions.
While family firms develop fewer innovations and inventions than non-family firms, those innovations tend to be more relevant to the market. In addition, a tightly knit, well-connected board will encourage more innovation.
Caught between low-power employees and high-power executives, the ‘middle power’ of middle managers keeps them hopping between the roles of subordinate and superior. A new Theory of Power framework helps middle managers, their bosses and their organizations identify the challenges and psychological consequences of their caught-in-the-middle position.
Why Being a Middle Manager Is So Exhausting. Eric M. Anicich, Jacob B. Hirsh. Harvard Business Review (March 22, 2017). Through a series of empirical studies exploring the concept of charisma outside of an organizational leadership context, a team of researchers identify the two core dimensions of personal charisma and show that charisma is an informal personality trait observable in any context.
In their efforts to persuade and influence others, leaders pay close attention to the words they choose. Listeners, however, often doubt the sincerity of those trying hard to persuade them. Research into how leaders modulate their voices — by adjusting the volume of their speech, for example — reveals that such ‘paralinguistic cues’ can enhance their persuasiveness, and even increase their perceived sincerity.
Dedicated collaborative spaces for cross-functional and open innovation (mixing internal and external participants) teams can encourage and enhance collaboration, but can also generate their own constraints. Co-location alone is not a silver bullet strategy for seamless collaboration among diverse teams.
The use of hiring algorithms willing to ‘explore’ job candidates with profiles that differ from past successful candidates increases the diversity of a firm’s workforce, a new study shows.
Leaders have different origin stories—the stories of how they became leaders. For example, some were thrust in leadership positions; others became leaders when they decided to start an initiative. A new study shows that origin stories legitimize leaders in their leadership roles and explain the variety of motivations, styles and personalities through which they enact those leadership roles.
An in-depth study of Huawei Technologies reveals how innovative organizational structures and radical leadership development strategies create a ‘super-fluid’ corporation ready to adapt to the challenges of continuously changing customer needs.
A new study building on leadership from an evolutionary perspective and exploring the needs of followers reveals that leadership is most in demand when a group needs to coordinate their activities, and when conflicts of interests threaten effective action by the group.
Societal expectations concerning gender and leadership attributes pull women leaders in opposite directions: if strong, they are criticized for not being empathetic or likeable; if empathetic, they are criticized for not being strong enough. The best women leaders thrive by managing these tensions through a paradox mindset.
Two academics argue that the current push for corporations to focus on nebulous stakeholder value rather than traditional shareholder value only provides cover for underperforming managers.
Self-imposed constraints undermine employers’ resolve to promote employee health and wellness. When employers fully accept the link between healthy employees and long-term profitability, the once insurmountable constraints can be quickly resolved.
The individual personalities of coachees impact the success of coaching interventions. Individuals who are open to the new and the different, who have low self-esteem and other low core self evaluations, or who tend to set goals focused on avoiding failure are those more likely to benefit from coaching.
Building on their own research and case studies, as well as the research of others, three experts in organization studies build a framework for organizational culture as a lever for change. At the heart of the framework is the concept of organizational culture as a ‘toolkit’ of resources.
Get a good night’s sleep before the big meeting, but better yet, get enough sleep every night, follow a routine, and don’t stay out late even if you can sleep in, according to an MIT study that furthers our understanding of the productivity benefits of sleep.
While high external performance expectations often improve performance, they can also have the opposite effect. Research shows that high-performance expectations can increase the embarrassment of those who experience early setbacks, reducing their motivation to persist and leading, ultimately, to failure.
Research shows that when faced with negative attention for their lack of diversity, companies strive to reach the level of diversity found in similar companies. Once they reach this threshold, however, they are satisfied and cease their diversity efforts. The result is an invisible cap on diversity imposed by social norms thresholds.
An experimental study of the decision-making process in cross-functional teams reveals the impact of leadership, or lack thereof, on the quality of the teams’ decisions and the satisfaction of team members with those decisions.
Research-based on Norway’s pioneering quota for corporate boards reveals the positive impact of demand-side pressure to resolve the gender gap in corporate top leadership—and the contribution gender differences bring to corporate strategies and outcomes.
Mentees with a growth mindset, mentors driven by empathy and a desire to give, and program administrators who invest in training for mentors and mentees on how to best leverage mentoring relationships are leading success factors for entrepreneurial mentorship programs.
Management controls can be used to overcome the challenge of aligning conflicting corporate strategies with functional tasks, such as new product development.
The best entrepreneurship education and training (EET) programs for women, especially in developing countries, focus not only on the program goals and its contents or curriculum but also on often-overlooked human factors — e.g. the intentions of the participants — and the contextual environment in which the entrepreneurs will be working.
Women mentors and mentees both benefit from their involvement in mentoring programs, acquiring a range of cognitive, skill-based, and affective-related learning — and to a lesser extent social networking skills.
