The greying of the post-war baby boom generation and increasing life expectancy are threatening the financial sustainability of pensions systems in many industrialized countries. European governments are responding by raising the mandatory retirement age. But this could be a short-sighted strategy. Recent research suggests that working for longer can have a negative effect on cognitive […]
Read More… from Delaying Retirement Can Be Bad for the Brain
"The answer is moral leadership, or, more specifically, respectful leadership." One of the goals of leaders is to motivate employees to perform well, work in the collective interest and define themselves in terms of ‘we’ rather than ‘me’. (See Idea Number 164, ‘Instilling Morality In Organizations’.) In this, leaders who are demographically different from followers are […]
Read More… from Fostering Diversity and Inclusion with Respectful Leadership
The banking crisis and scandals involving companies such as Enron, Worldcom, Tyco and, more recently, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, have made the need to understand moral behaviour in organizations more urgent. Research so far has tended to take a leader-focused approach, implying that the ethical behaviour of leaders translates directly to ethical behaviour in followers. […]
The authors say that a qualitative shift is taking place in the ways we work. Their research is based of ongoing studies of the key forces driving change in society, combined with interviews, through which they explore the impact of these changes on workers and their careers. As such, they identify 10 skills they believe […]
Read More… from Ten Critical Skills for Tomorrow’s Workforce
A large-scale study by Vlerick Business School, in association with three media partners, De Standaard, La Libre Belgique and NRC Handelsblad, underlines the importance of non-financial rewards to employees. The study, based on a poll of 4,877 people in Flanders, Wallonia and the Netherlands working in 18 different sectors, measured attitudes to salary, bonuses and […]
Derailment is the term assigned to the phenomenon of once-successful managers whose careers have ‘gone off the track.’ They are no longer effective in their functions or as leaders. They are no longer promotable. They are no longer contributing to the organization, despite years of experience and accumulated knowledge. What happened? Through a number of […]
Here is how most employees’ first day on a new job goes: they are shown how things are done, introduced to the company’s environment and culture, and subtly told what a great organization they have just joined. Sound familiar? This is the onboarding process followed by many HR professionals, with the commonly-held belief that this […]
Rising unemployment, household incomes taking a dip, bankruptcies becoming widespread — these are just some of the hallmarks of an economic recession. We all remember these things from not too long ago. In the recent global downturn, many companies were seen letting go of their highest-wage employees. Though this might make sense from a finance […]
Read More… from Leveraging Cyclical Unemployment for a Stronger Workforce
A multi-year, collaborative research study set out to examine the steps global companies can take to ensure that they recruit, develop and deploy the right people. Researchers from institutions including INSEAD, Cornell, and Cambridge University came together and analysed companies that were selected based on superior business performance and reputation. They found that in addition […]
Read More… from Principles of Competitive Global Talent Management
Finding ways to generate more value from employees and optimize talent is critical for leaders and HR professionals. Organizations could get even more from their investments in talent management if they focused on collaboration. That is why leaders need to be aware of how collaboration takes place among top performers and key experts in their […]
Read More… from Harnessing Individual and Organization Networks
