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, […]
Subject: Talent Management
Competitive Advantage through Individuals Outside the Norm
When in May 2013, software giant SAP announced that it would hire hundreds of people who were diagnosed with autism, the assumption among casual observers might have been that SAP was engaging in a laudable act of social responsibility. However, SAP executives, working with researchers and consultants in the field of autistic individuals in work […]
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Turn Employee Envy into a Tool for Personal Development
When envy pervades a company — when employees and managers for one reason or another focus more on competing against each other instead of the company’s marketplace competitors — the result is a dysfunctional organization whose effectiveness and efficiency is greatly undermined. For example, various explanations are given for Microsoft’s failure to compete effectively against […]
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Why Employees Hide Their Knowledge and How to Encourage Sharing
While employees are supposed to share their knowledge with other employees for the benefit of the company, employees will often find a reason to keep that knowledge to themselves. Perhaps they believe that they will lose some status or power; sometimes employees who share knowledge will then be judged or evaluated based on that knowledge; […]
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What is the Psychology Behind Resistance to Change?
Why are some people more open to change and others instinctively resistant to anything that significantly alters the status quo? The key is often in an individual’s basic attitude toward change. Some people will default to an unfavourable, negative attitude toward change that leads to resistance, while others have within them a favourable positive attitude […]
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How Landmarks in Time Help Employees Set Aspirational Goals
Why do so many people make New Year’s resolutions? Because the New Year is the most obvious and universal of temporal landmarks — the dates or periods in time that mark a meaningful transition or change. Anything from a birthday or an anniversary to the first day on a new job or even in a […]
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Happiness at Work: How Daily Reminders Improve Employee Morale
Research in the past suggested that specifically working at happiness (what can I do today to be happier?) is counterproductive since it focuses the person on what is making him or her unhappy. New research, however, argues for an opposite effect: focusing on your happiness makes you happier. The researchers found that participants in three […]
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How Best to Juggle Multiple Conversations at Work
Technology that is supposed to make us more productive only seems to have complicated our task. We may be in an important meeting but know that whoever just sent an email is waiting for a response… and waiting impatiently. Is it possible to carry on multiple conversations and still be fully effective? Research shows that […]
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Can Employees Be Motivated by More than Money and Benefits?
Motivation can be divided into two dimensions: outcome-focused and process-focused. With outcome-focused motivation, people are driven by the desire of an achievement. They want to finish the task so that the task is done. They want a finished report in hand and ready to be submitted; they want the presentation to be written and delivered. […]
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Back to Leadership Basics: Make Time for Your Team
It sounds so obvious. It is obvious. But far too few managers actually do it. We are talking about the most basic of leadership tasks – spending as much time as possible working closely with their direct reports and other employees for whom they are responsible. By so doing, they will have a far greater […]
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