Learning from errors is central to human development. Learning in a business context occurs best when there is a mind-set of acceptance of human error, and furthermore the experimental trials that lead to successful innovation, new processes and better performance necessarily entail errors on the way. Due to the potential costs and negative, sometimes disastrous, […]
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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 investigation into the problems of the 1973 Ford Pinto, a car susceptible to catastrophic explosions when rear-ended, revealed that Ford’s engineers had calculated that the company could save $11 per car at a cost of 180 burn deaths. While perhaps an exaggerated case of numbers pushing aside moral and ethical considerations, there is a […]
Read More… from How a Numbers-Crunching Culture Can Increase Unethical Behaviour
There is no doubt that social media has improved both internal and external corporate communication, especially for multinational companies. Social media has, for example, enabled corporations to increase opportunities for two-way communication with their customers at a low cost. However, customers using social media communicate in their own language, which means that a social media […]
Read More… from The Language Challenge for Social Media in Multinationals
Public sector organizations are multirational organizations. They do not fall under a single rationality archetype — for example, they are not uniquely political organizations or economic organizations or legal organizations, but rather all of the above. Two researchers from St. Gallen University, Ali Asker Guenduez and Kuno Schedler, build on the social systems theory of […]
Read More… from Public Sector Leadership: Managing ‘Multirational’ Organizations
In addition to economic and diversity issues, the Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook Survey for the fourth quarter of 2014 focused on the issue of millennials in the workplace. A majority of CFOs surveyed believe that millennials can add value to companies, especially, according to 70% of the CFOs surveyed, through the technological savvy […]
Read More… from Firms Are Not Adapting to the Millennial Workforce
The true measure of integrity in a firm is not comforting slogans on the home page of the company website, but how employees feel about whether top management, through its actions and behaviours, is living up to the promise. A culture of integrity exists when employees perceive top managers as trustworthy and ethical. "The higher […]
Read More… from How a Culture of Integrity Boosts the Bottom Line
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
In recent years, there has been tremendous focus on ways to enhance employee engagement, performance and workplace outcomes. The crucial role of the supervisor has been at the centre of this focus, in particular the effects that an abusive supervisor can have on workplace outcomes, especially in the past decade. Previous research has defined abusive […]
The ‘lure of the virtual’ has led many organizations to believe that one day not too far away, we will be able to accomplish with computers what has historically only been done physically. Already, the idea of working virtually has moved well away from the realm of science fiction to reality for many organizations around […]
Read More… from How Virtual Ways of Working Impact on Team Productivity
