Human Resources →
- 08 Dec 2008
- Research & Ideas
Thinking Twice About Supply-Chain Layoffs
Cutting the wrong employees can be counterproductive for retailers, according to research from Zeynep Ton. One suggestion: Pay special attention to staff who handle mundane tasks such as stocking and labeling. Your customers do. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 22 Oct 2008
- Working Paper Summaries
Variation in Experience and Team Familiarity: Addressing the Knowledge Acquisition-Application Problem
Team familiarity helps team members successfully locate knowledge within a group, share the knowledge they possess, and respond to the knowledge of others. While team familiarity may help all teams to better coordinate their actions, it may play a particularly important role for teams with individuals looking to apply knowledge from their varied experience. This possibility leads to the question that provides the foundation for this paper: Does team familiarity moderate the relationship between variation in experience and performance? Prior research attempting to link variation in experience and performance has found effects ranging from positive to neutral to negative. Huckman and Staats explain these differential results by drawing on related work from learning, knowledge management, and social networking. Key concepts include: Managers may benefit from a more detailed understanding of the types of experience that are relevant in their setting (e.g., market, technology). If the most valuable assets of many companies are their employees, then organizations may need to shift from thinking about their project portfolio to their employee-experience portfolio. Conditions that assist in the acquisition of useful knowledge, such as variation in experience, will not guarantee—and may even deter—the eventual application of that knowledge. It is important to separate the processes of knowledge acquisition and knowledge application. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 20 Oct 2008
- Research & Ideas
The Seven Things That Surprise New CEOs
In the newly released book On Competition, Professor Michael E. Porter updates his classic articles on the competitive forces that shape strategy. We excerpt a portion on advice for new CEOs, written with HBS faculty Jay W. Lorsch and Nitin Nohria. Key concepts include: Most new chief executives are taken aback by unfamiliar new roles, time and information limitations, and altered professional relationships. The CEO must learn to manage organizational context rather than focus on daily operations. The CEO must not get totally absorbed in the role. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 29 Sep 2008
- Research & Ideas
How Economics May Lead to Better Football Games
When economists watch football games they see more than flying pigskin and stadiums overflowing with fans. In the case of U.S. college football, Harvard Business School professor Alvin E. Roth along with Guillaume R. Fréchette and M. Utku Ünver studied the timing of team selection for championship bowls. What they found: Good teams are much better matched up than they used to be, and there are implications beyond sports. Q&A with Al Roth. Key concepts include: Until 1992, college teams were matched for bowl games before the regular football season had ended. Thanks to tweaks in the design of postseason play, larger numbers of teams can be potentially matched after their final rankings are known. The total viewership of college bowls has increased. Roth et al.'s paper may provide the first direct evidence and measurement of the inefficiency due to early transaction times in a naturally occurring market. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 24 Sep 2008
- Working Paper Summaries
CEO and CFO Career Penalties to Missing Quarterly Analysts Forecasts
(Previous title: "CEO and CFO Career Consequences to Missing Quarterly Earnings Benchmarks.") This paper investigates whether the failure to meet quarterly earnings benchmarks such as the analysts' consensus forecast matters to CEO and CFO careers, after controlling for both operating and stock return performance and the magnitude of the earnings "surprise" revealed at the earnings announcement. In particular, it evaluates a comprehensive set of career consequences such as the impact on compensation, in the form of bonus and equity grants, and the dismissal of both the CEO and the CFO, conditioned on the failure to meet quarterly earnings benchmarks. Key concepts include: Missing analysts' consensus forecasts can potentially damage senior executives' careers. CEOs and CFOs also experience compensation penalties if their firms fail to meet the analysts' consensus forecast. Most of these career penalties for missing earnings benchmarks have increased in the post-Sarbanes-Oxley environment. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 17 Jul 2008
- Working Paper Summaries
A Replication Study of Alan Blinder’s “How Many U.S. Jobs Might Be Offshorable?”
The movement of business activity from developed economies to developing economies—commonly called offshoring—has become the focus of heated debates. Behind these debates lies a pivotal question of scale: How much business activity and how many jobs are at stake? Official statistics are nearly silent, and private-sector researchers vary widely in their estimates of the number of U.S. jobs that have moved offshore, will move offshore, or could move offshore. In an effort to address this gap in prior literature, Princeton economist Alan Blinder released an innovative working paper in 2007 in which he personally reviewed more than 800 occupations in the United States, assessed the "offshorability" of each, and used the evaluations to estimate the total number of U.S. jobs that might be offshorable. Here, HBS research associate Troy Smith and Professor Jan W. Rivkin describe an online exercise that allowed 152 teams of HBS MBA students, collectively, to recreate Blinder's study and to develop insights about the future of offshoring. Key concepts include: The surge in the number of potentially offshorable jobs in recent decades suggests that fewer business activities are tied to a specific location. More often, the laws of economics drive the geography of business activity. Some of the most creative applications of offshoring have taken jobs, broken them down into component tasks, bundled them in new ways, and relocated each new bundle to the place where its tasks can be completed best or cheapest. This opportunity to rethink the fundamental grouping of tasks, not just to adjust the geographic array of historical "job" bundles, gives businesspeople a broad menu of new options for taking advantage of differences across borders. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 16 Jul 2008
- Op-Ed
What Should Employers Do about Health Care?
Companies that cut health care costs without improving the overall value of care eventually pay a price in terms of employee absenteeism and chronic ailments. According to Harvard University professor and strategy expert Michael E. Porter and coauthors, the best way to truly reduce health care costs is to improve quality. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 14 Apr 2008
- Research & Ideas
The Surprising Right Fit for Software Testing
Software analysts and programmers live to innovate—but hate to run tests. Yet top-notch testing saves many a company money when bugs are caught early. A case study describes the secret behind a Danish consultancy's success: The majority of its testers have Asperger syndrome or a form of autism spectrum disorder. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 14 Aug 2007
- Working Paper Summaries
Improving Patient Outcomes: The Effects of Staff Participation and Collaboration in Healthcare Delivery
Health-care organizations have a well-documented, industry-wide need to improve their processes. To that aim, the Institute of Medicine has made at least 2 recommendations that focus on front-line staff—physicians, nurses, and respiratory therapists. The first recommendation states that front-line staff should be involved in unit decision-making and the design of work processes and workflow (participation). The second emphasizes respectful interactions among front-line staff, including information-sharing and coordinating activities to achieve organizational goals (collaboration). This study provides preliminary supporting evidence for the Institute of Medicine's recommendations to use a dual, front-line strategy of participation and collaboration to improve patient outcomes. Key concepts include: Shared decision-making and respectful collaboration are vital to enabling improvement in health-care organizations. Front-line staff participation in process improvement can solve a common problem: lack of commitment from health-care professionals to implement new practices. Units with more collaboration—as measured by staff perception and use of collaborative work practices—experienced greater improvement in risk-adjusted mortality among patients. Participation in process improvement may be an effective strategy for other service organizations that face staff resistance to new routines. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 10 Jul 2007
- What Do You Think?
How Much of Leadership Is About Control, Delegation, or Theater?
Forum now closed. Summing up the many responses, Jim Heskett says that the mix of control, delegation, and theater employed by successful leaders depends on timing and circumstances. "The strongest messages I received were that if leadership involves control, it is only over setting an organization's course and priorities." Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 01 Jun 2007
- What Do You Think?
How Should Pay Be Linked to Performance?
Online forum now CLOSED. Professor Jim Heskett sums up 98 reader responses from around the world. As he concludes, is there another subject as important as this one about which we assume so much and know so little? Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 23 Apr 2007
- Research & Ideas
Are Great Teams Less Productive?
While studying teamwork, Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson chanced upon a seeming paradox: Well-led teams appeared to make more mistakes than average teams. Could this be true? As it turned out, good teams, which value communication, report more errors. In a recent research paper Edmondson and doctoral student Sara Singer explore this and other hidden barriers to organizational learning. Key concepts include: There are built-in tensions between learning and performance, which smart organizations must learn to recognize and deal with. The challenge for managers is to promote learning without sacrificing performance in the short term. In well-led teams, a climate of openness could make it easier to report and discuss errors compared to teams with poor relationships or with punitive leaders. The good teams, according to this interpretation, don't make more mistakes, they report more. Seen in this way, managers have two jobs. One is to become team leaders who encourage open discussion, trial and error, and the pursuit of new possibilities in the small groups they directly influence. The other is to work hard to build organizations conducive to extraordinary teamwork and learning behaviors throughout the organization. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 08 Dec 2006
- Working Paper Summaries
When Learning and Performance are at Odds: Confronting the Tension
While most people agree that learning leads to improved performance, there are several ways in which learning and performance in organizations can be at odds. First, when organizations take on a new learning challenge, performance often suffers in the short term, because new behaviors or practices are not yet highly skilled. Second, by revealing and analyzing their failures and mistakes—a critical aspect of learning—individuals or work groups may appear to be performing less well than they would otherwise. This paper reviews research that describes the challenges of learning from failure in organizations, and argues that these challenges can be at least partly addressed by leadership that creates a climate of psychological safety and that promotes inquiry. Key concepts include: In organizations, the costs of learning may at times be more visible than the benefits. Therefore, leaders must publicize this idea broadly, or else learning may not happen. Experimentation, by its nature, will inevitably result in failures; yet without these failures learning cannot occur. Leadership is essential for fostering the mindset, group behaviors, and organizational investments that promote learning now and invest in performance later. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 27 Nov 2006
- What Do You Think?
What’s to Be Done About Performance Reviews?
What can we do to make performance reviews more productive and less distasteful? Should their objectives be scaled back to just one or two? Should they be disengaged from the determination of compensation and, if so, how? Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 25 Oct 2006
- Op-Ed
Fixing Executive Options: The Veil of Ignorance
Who says you can't rewrite history? Dozens of companies have been caught in the practice of backdating options for top executives. But this is only part of the problem with C-level compensation packages, which often motivate top executives to act in their own best interests rather than those of shareholders. Professors Mihir Desai and Joshua Margolis turn to philosopher John Rawls for a solution: Reward the execs, but don't give them the details. Key concepts include: Too often executive incentive packages are not aligned with the best interests of shareholders. Why create long-term value if your bread is buttered by quarterly performance? Option compensation could be restructured to ensure that managers were aware of the value of their compensation without any knowledge of the details of their compensation—a concept inspired by philosopher John Rawls' work on distributive justice. These options may only be useful for CEOs, senior officers, and directors—not middle management. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 13 Sep 2006
- Op-Ed
Rising CEO Pay: What Directors Should Do
Compensation committees are under pressure to keep CEO pay high, even as shareholders and the media agitate for moderation. The solution? Boards of directors need better competitive information and an ear to what shareholders are saying, says Jay Lorsch. Key concepts include: CEO compensation in the U.S. continues to soar—American CEOs make twice what their European counterparts earn. Shareholders want to moderate pay hikes for top execs, but board members often give more weight to internal organizational pressures. Boards must be more critical of consultant reports, listen to shareholders, and align CEO pay with what is earned by other top management in the company. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 30 Aug 2006
- Op-Ed
The Compensation Game
Do CEOs deserve "star" compensation? The idea that CEO pay is driven by the invisible hand of market forces is a myth from which chief executives have long benefited, say Harvard professors Lucian Bebchuk and Rakesh Khurana. Key concepts include: It is wrong to use sports stars' salaries to justify high CEO compensation. When setting CEO pay, board members can be influenced by economic incentives that are reinforced by social and psychological factors. Directors must be given strong incentives to focus on shareholder interests. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 19 Mar 2006
- Research & Ideas
Do I Dare Say Something?
Are you afraid to speak up at work? The amount of fear in the modern workplace is just one surprising finding from recent research done by HBS professor Amy Edmondson and her colleague, Professor James Detert from Penn State. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
- 27 Feb 2006
- Research & Ideas
Take Responsibility for Rising Stars
Leadership succession and recruitment need the sharp attention of your company's top executives and board. But who should be held accountable—and how? An excerpt from a Harvard Business Review article by Jeffrey Cohn, Rakesh Khurana, and Laura Reeves. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.
10 Reasons to Design a Better Corporate Culture
Organizations with strong, adaptive cultures enjoy labor cost advantages, great employee and customer loyalty, and a smoother on-ramp in leadership succession. A book excerpt from The Ownership Quotient: Putting the Service Profit Chain to Work for Unbeatable Competitive Advantage by HBS professors Jim Heskett and W. Earl Sasser and coauthor Joe Wheeler. Closed for comment; 0 Comments.