Vicarious learning, that is, learning from the experiences of others in the organization, including your peers, has always been a vital component of collective learning in any organization. Traditionally, vicarious learning was achieved through direct observation or formal knowledge transfer opportunities. However, these learning strategies are disappearing in the knowledge-intensive industries of today, where work […]
Read More… from Learning from Your Peers: The Power of Storytelling
What influence does a CEO’s personality have on the major strategic decisions of his or her firm? To answer this question, a team of researchers studied the impact of a CEO’s extraverted or introverted nature on his or her company’s M&A activities. The team focused on extraversion as a personality trait because of the ‘big […]
Creativity is generating creative ideas. Innovation is successfully implementing creative ideas. Past researchers have connected creators to implementation by looking at such factors as network position: if creators have the right network, they have a greater chance of getting their ideas implemented. In his recent research, Stanford’s Justin Berg highlights another important factor in the […]
Conventional wisdom has it that diversity helps creativity, in that people in homogenous groups are similar to one another with similar ideas and therefore less divergent thinking occurs. Also most research into group creativity assumes that creativity is unleashed by removing conventional constraints. This research, from Professor Jennifer Chatman of the UC Berkeley Haas School […]
Read More… from How Political Correctness Increases Creativity in Mixed-Sex Teams
An employee’s work usually consists of two types of tasks or behaviours: in-role tasks, which are the tasks required by the job or position; and discretionary behaviours, which are undertaken by the employee in order to help others or the organization but that are not required tasks or responsibilities. Of course, employees are not always […]
Employees just joining the workforce will have different experiences in their first jobs, depending on the economic situation of the firm in which they land. This economic situation makes a major difference in the skills, habits and routines that these first-time employees develop. For example, new workers who arrive during good economic times will have […]
Read More… from How Early Work Experience Shapes Later Leadership Outlook
The factors that bring people together into a collaborative venture are varied. One is proximity and shared goals: people within a department, for example, have more opportunities to work together than people across different departments. Another factor is similarity: people who are similar to each other, either because they have the same or similar age, […]
Love is not a word often found in management literature, although the consensus now recognizes the power of emotions in motivating (or demotivating) people. Daniel Goleman and others have popularized the influence of emotions in effective leadership. But even in discussions involving emotions, rarely does the word ‘love’ come up. Love in the workplace? Don’t […]
The decisions of C-suites and boards are influenced by the previous experiences of their members. In uncertain situations, organizations gain legitimacy — and reduce the costs of experimentation — by copying others. These common-sense principles are borne out in a large body of research that points to the importance of ‘interlocks’ — i.e. previous or current ties to […]
Unconstrained exercise of power and high self-regard on the part of leaders can have damaging consequences for organizations. Previous research has consistently demonstrated the negative and potentially detrimental effects that these traits on the part of CEOs can have, which has led to the concept of humility being explored more and more in psychology and […]
Read More… from How Humility in the CEO Improves Management Performance
