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  • Article

Research: Cracking a Joke at Work Can Make You Seem More Competent

By: Alison Wood Brooks
Keywords: Humor; Judgment
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  • 2014
  • Working Paper

Risky Business: Humor Can Increase Perceptions of Status, but Only If the Jokes Are Funny

By: B.T. Bitterly, A.W. Brooks and M.E. Schweitzer
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  • March 2017
  • Article

Risky Business: When Humor Increases and Decreases Status

By: T. B. Bitterly, A.W. Brooks and M. E. Schweitzer
Across eight experiments, we demonstrate that humor can influence status, but attempting to use humor is risky. The successful use of humor can increase status in both new and existing relationships, but unsuccessful humor attempts (e.g., inappropriate jokes) can harm... View Details
Keywords: Status and Position; Behavior; Groups and Teams; Perception
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  • Article

Stop the Meeting Madness: How to Free Up Time for Meaningful Work

By: Leslie Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley and Eunice Eun
Many executives feel overwhelmed by meetings, and no wonder: On average, they spend nearly 23 hours a week in them, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s. What’s more, the meetings are often poorly timed, badly run, or both. We can all joke about how painful they... View Details
Keywords: Time Management; Performance Efficiency; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance Improvement
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  • November 2008
  • Supplement

Differences at Work: Sameer (B)

By: Sandra J. Sucher and Rachel Gordon
In Differences at Work: Sameer (B) HBS Case No. 9-609-054, Sameer leaves the firm at the summer's end without confronting his employer about the jokes and wondering whether he made the right choice. Later Sameer's former employer calls him to apologize for their... View Details
Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Moral Sensibility; Resignation and Termination; Working Conditions; Opportunities; Behavior
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  • October 2019
  • Article

Making Sense of Recommendations

By: Michael Yeomans, Anuj Shah, Sendhil Mullainathan and Jon Kleinberg
Computer algorithms are increasingly being used to predict people's preferences and make recommendations. Although people frequently encounter these algorithms because they are cheap to scale, we do not know how they compare to human judgment. Here, we compare computer... View Details
Keywords: Recommender Systems; Artificial Intelligence; Interpretability; Information Technology; Forecasting and Prediction; Decision Making; Attitudes
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  • Research Summary

The Psychology of Conversation

By: Alison Wood Brooks

Conversation is a profound part of the human experience. To share our ideas, thoughts, and feelings with each other, we converse face to face and remotely—via phone, email, text message, online comment boards, and in contracts. Conversations form the bedrock of our... View Details

  • 06 Sep 2016
  • First Look

September 6, 2016

relationship between the successful use of humor and status is mediated by perceptions of confidence and competence. The successful use of humor signals confidence and competence, which in turn increases the joke teller’s status.... View Details
Keywords: Carmen Nobel
  • 13 Jun 2022
  • Research & Ideas

Extroverts, Your Colleagues Wish You Would Just Shut Up and Listen

listening: Offer verbal cues of listening. Repeat back and paraphrase what someone has just said. Make use of phrases like “right,” “yes,” and “mm-hmm” in conversation. Look for other ways to signal engagement—laugh at jokes and be silent... View Details
Keywords: by Pamela Reynolds
  • 03 Oct 2023
  • Research Event

Build the Life You Want: Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey Share Happiness Tips

School. Brooks: I made that joke for a reason. Goldberg: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [INAUDIBLE] And and and I want to just-- I want to be clear that Harvard Divinity School and Harvard Business School have a lot in coon. You know. They both have... View Details
Keywords: by HBS Staff
  • 29 Jul 2002
  • Research & Ideas

Time Pressure and Creativity: Why Time is Not on Your Side

and maintained that through regular phone calls and emails from me and my RAs; and (3) we tried to make it fun by giving them little gifts at the meetings (like "TEAM Study" coffee mugs), and including jokes and trivia questions... View Details
Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Education; Fine Arts
  • 20 Nov 2019
  • Research & Ideas

It's No Joke: AI Beats Humans at Making You Laugh

We all enjoy sharing jokes with friends, hoping a witty one might elicit a smile—or maybe even a belly laugh. Here’s one for you: A lawyer opened the door of his BMW, when, suddenly, a car came along and hit the door, ripping it off... View Details
Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman
  • 28 Jun 2022
  • Book

The Moral Enterprise: How Two Companies Profit with Purpose

How can government and business work together in this fractious political moment, when finding solutions to pressing problems like inequality and climate change are more urgent than ever? Rebecca Henderson, Harvard University’s John and Natty McArthur University... View Details
Keywords: by Avery Forman
  • 17 Sep 2012
  • Research & Ideas

Blue Skies, Distractions Arise: How Weather Affects Productivity

thinking," the researchers write. For Gino, the findings match up with her professorial career. In fact, she says, academics often joke that they seek out positions in harsh climates on purpose, so that they won't feel like they're... View Details
Keywords: by Carmen Nobel
  • 29 Oct 2019
  • Sharpening Your Skills

Robots in the Boardroom

artificial intelligence, and related technologies in the twenty-first century Making Sense of RecommendationsWe compare computer recommender systems to human recommenders in a domain that affords humans many advantages: predicting which View Details
Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne
  • 31 Oct 2017
  • Op-Ed

Op-Ed: In Tackling #MeToo, Don’t Ignore Micro-Insults That Harm Women’s Careers

share useful information in informal settings. One of the ways people who are in the numerical minority (I call them O’s) get accepted into groups of otherwise all X’s is to be seen as “having a good sense of humor.” That means laughing at View Details
Keywords: by Rosabeth Moss Kanter
  • 08 Jun 2009
  • Research & Ideas

The Return of the Salesman

customer. All the aspects of the profession that had to do with promoting change and overcoming resistance made the figure of the salesperson popular to fiction writers—and most of the characterizations have been negative, from jokes... View Details
Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Retail
  • 11 Apr 2018
  • Research & Ideas

Sexual Harassment: What Employers Should Do Now

shouldn’t matter, particularly if that behavior crosses the line into sexual harassment. Goldberg wrote a 2010 case about the sole female employee in an 11-person production shop who complained about dealing with crass sexual jokes and... View Details
Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman
  • 11 Jul 2017
  • First Look

First Look at New Ideas and Research, July 11

from less than 10 hours in the 1960s. What’s more, the meetings are often poorly timed, badly run, or both. We can all joke about how painful they are, say the authors, but that pain has real consequences for teams and organizations.... View Details
Keywords: Sean Silverthorne
  • 21 May 2001
  • Research & Ideas

From Tigers to Kaleidoscopes: Thinking About Future Leadership

A. Bartlett, and Peter Moran. "One of the hikers immediately reaches for his running shoes. 'You cannot outrun a tiger,' reminds his partner. "'Yes,' he responds, but all I have to do is outrun you.'" That little tale may make for a good View Details
Keywords: by Martha Lagace

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