For decades, the prevailing trend in corporate architecture has been a ‘war on walls’, characterised by the removal of cubicles and private offices in favour of open, ‘unbounded’ workspaces. The primary motivation for this shift is the belief that removing physical barriers will foster greater collaboration, increase face-to-face (F2F) interaction, and boost the ‘collective intelligence’ […]
Read More… from The Transparency Paradox: How Open Plan Offices Shut Down Interaction
Contemporary management trends often advocate for flatter organizational hierarchies, an approach characterized by a significant increase in the number of individuals reporting to a single leader, commonly referred to as the “span of supervision.” While broader spans can offer organizational benefits, such as fostering employee autonomy and improving cost-effectiveness, they simultaneously raise concerns regarding reduced […]
Read More… from The Hidden Costs of Expanding a Leader’s Span of Supervision
Business leaders often articulate a corporate purpose to define strategic direction and inspire employee commitment beyond just financial gains. Examples include Veolia’s pledge for “ecological transformation” and Stanley Black & Decker’s dedication “for those who make the world”. However, the challenge lies in incorporating these holistic aspirations into day-to-day operations. Team leaders are the critical […]
The traditional view in human resource management often focuses on individual employees managing their family demands, often seeing these demands as detrimental and a source of work-family conflict (WFC). A study from a team of American and Chinese researchers challenged this paradigm by introducing the concept of family demands diversity. Family demands diversity refers to […]
Read More… from How Varying Family Demands of Team Members Help the Team
Population aging is a significant global phenomenon. The result is an aging and age-diverse workforce where multiple generations must work together effectively. Human Resource Management (HRM) practices play a key role promoting successful aging at work by encouraging and enabling older workers to proactively maintain or recover high levels of ability and the motivation to […]
Lying, or any form of deception, is a negative and destructive behavior that is proscribed in organizations—at least theoretically. ReReal-lifeypically complicates theory, and a study from the University of Chicago Prof. Emma Levine reveals that whether deception is, unwarranted and destructive is heavily dependent on the context. Levine conducted a series of inductive and empirical […]
Having discovered the benefits of working from home (WFH) during the COVID-19 pandemic, notably the improvement in work-life balance, many employees are reluctant to return to the office full-time. One reaction from business leaders is to offer hybrid working arrangements that include a mix of work-from-home and work-from-office (WFO) hours. A team of economists from […]
Read More… from Working from Home, Hybrid Arrangements Can Reduce Innovation
The well-documented “virtual meeting fatigue” the tiredness one feels after virtual meetings has been attributed to exhaustion arising from the multiple physical and psychological demands of such meetings. These physical and psychological demands include the requirement to pay constant attention to the screen, to engage in verbal and nonverbal communication, and to be constantly presentable. […]
Read More… from Why Virtual Meetings Make Us Tired and Can Hurt Our Performance
Because of new communications technologies, including a proliferation of video-conferencing options over the Internet, many have declared the “death of distance.” Geographical separation of even thousands of miles is no longer a barrier to close collaboration. Collaborators can work together on projects with the same ease and effectiveness whether they are physically located on different […]
One resilient conclusion from leadership commentators and observers is the connection between extraversion and leadership—that is, extraverted individuals are more likely to become leaders than introverted individuals. Leadership research, however, continuously calls into question this conclusion. Consistently over time, the results are mixed: some research will show a link between extraversion and leadership, and other […]
Read More… from Why Extraverts Don’t Necessarily Make Good Leaders
