Ethan S. Bernstein

Organizations—particularly human resources teams—tend to address bad behaviors very quietly while raising the visibility of good ones. Indeed, the more transparent workplaces have become, the harder HR has tried to keep employee transgressions private. But this research shows that making transgressions transparent, under the right conditions, may help rather than hurt an organization’s attempts to prevent those bad behaviors from reoccurring. Although making transgressions transparent—which can result in stigmatization or public shaming—is generally assumed to be purely punitive, in this study it fostered rehabilitation when employees developed a mutually acceptable narrative about their behavior and shared it with colleagues. For that narrative to endure, they needed to exercise self-control and avoid further transgressions, thus prompting rehabilitation.

Previous research has shown that network centralization—the degree to which communication flows disproportionately through one or more members—interferes with collective problem-solving by obstructing the integration of ideas, information, and solutions. But this study finds that the mechanisms responsible for poor integration in relatively stable environments can actually facilitate adaptive problem-solving in shifting environments. When a communication network is more centralized, it can achieve the benefits of connectivity (e.g., promoting learning by generating an array of novel, better solutions) without incurring the costs (e.g., getting stuck on an existing, inferior solution due to conformity pressure). However, these advantages materialize only in networks with two-way flows of information, which are often impeded by hierarchical structures or digitally mediated communication—suggesting a need for new forms of organizing and a need for new approaches to structuring collaboration.

Organizational psychologists have long held that monitoring workers saps them of their autonomy and thereby reduces their effectiveness. Yet technology has intensified such surveillance in recent years: Managers now track everything from clinicians’ handwashing to truck drivers’ efficiency to customer service reps’ interactions, sometimes with no detriment to performance and with strong support, not protest, from employees. To better understand this upside, my coauthor and I studied a ubiquitous form of employee monitoring: police body-worn cameras. We find that the potential for positive impact hinges on who has access to the gathered data. Whereas prior research assumes that access resides almost exclusively with supervisors and other evaluators, technological advances have enabled employee access as well. When employee access is allowed, although the autonomy-reducing effect remains intact, the drain it would otherwise place on effectiveness is mitigated by alleviation of employees’ perceived social and ideological gap between themselves and their evaluators—what we refer to as polarization. That finding helps to explain why prior studies of BWCs failed to show a consistent impact on performance: the opposing effects of decreased autonomy (which puts a drag on performance) and decreased polarization (which boosts it) had not been disaggregated and had thus cancelled each other out, resulting either in non-significant results or, because the two effects were idiosyncratic in magnitude, in inconsistent results across contexts and studies.

In early 2020, the world began what is undoubtedly the largest work-from-home experiment in history. Now, organizations continue to wrestle with whether and how to have workers return to their offices. Business leaders need to be able to answer a number of questions to make these decisions. Primary among them is “What impact has working from home had on productivity and creativity?”

To that end, my coauthors and I surveyed a diverse group of 680 U.S.-based white-collar employees every two weeks, starting mid-March 2020. (This article, one of the earliest published on this topic, previews results collected through May 2020, although we continued conducting the surveys for a full year.) We asked them about their job satisfaction, work engagement, perceptions of their own performance, conflicts with colleagues, stress levels, negative emotions, and current living situation, among other matters. The article summarizes our largely positive findings on the impact of remote work.

Winner of the annual MIT Sloan Management Review Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize, for the most outstanding MIT SMR article on planned change and organizational development. Chosen by MIT Sloan faculty judges Deborah Ancona, John Van Maanen, and Cyrus Gibson.

Leaders help establish a collaborative rhythm for employees—largely by planning work-group meetings, one-on-ones, end-of-shift handoffs, and so on. But collaboration has become much more complex and less controlled in recent years, given all the digital tools at employees’ disposal and the profusion of meetings that haven’t gone away. Orchestration has become quite a challenge.

In this article, my coauthors and I summarize our research on the value of intermittent collaboration for problem solving at work. While always-on connectivity helps people gather information and coordinate efforts, dedicated unplugged time is needed to support innovation and productivity. By having employees alternate between the two, organizations can reap the benefits and minimize the risks of increased connectivity.

Holacracy and other forms of self-organization have received a lot of press. Proponents hail them as "flat" environments that foster flexibility, engagement, productivity, and efficiency. Critics say they're naive, unrealistic experiments. My coauthors and I argue, using evidence from several organizations that have adopted these forms, that neither view is quite right. Although the new forms (built upon on a half-century of research on and experience with self-managed teams) can help organizations become more adaptable and nimble, most companies shouldn't adopt the principles wholesale. A piecemeal approach usually makes more sense. Organizations can use elements of self-management in areas where the need for adaptability is high and traditional models where reliability is paramount.

2014 INGRoup Outstanding Conference Paper

To get people to be more creative and productive, managers increase transparency with open workspaces and access to real-time data. But my research shows that less-transparent work environments can actually yield more-transparent employees who solve problems more effectively. Through close analysis of workers’ behaviors in various settings—including a mobile phone factory, a video game company, a trucking company, and a large retailer—I find that employees perform better when they can try out new ideas and approaches within certain zones of privacy. Organizations allow them to do that by drawing four types of boundaries: around teams of people (to create zones of attention), between feedback and evaluation (to cordon off zones of judgment from development), between decision rights and improvement rights (to carve out zones of slack), and for set periods of experimentation (to establish protected zones of time). By balancing transparency and privacy, organizations can encourage just the right amount of “productive deviance” to foster innovative behavior and boost performance.

2013 Winner of Academy of Management Awards for Outstanding Publication in Organizational Behavior and Best Published Paper in Organization and Management Theory

Using data from embedded participant-observers and a field experiment at the second largest mobile phone factory in the world, located in China, I theorize and test the implications of transparent organizational design on workers’ productivity and organizational performance. Drawing from theory and research on learning and control, I introduce the notion of a transparency paradox, whereby observing workers may counterintuitively impede their performance by inducing them to conceal their activities through codes and other costly means; conversely, creating zones of privacy may, under certain conditions, improve performance. Empirical evidence from the field shows that even a modest increase in group-level privacy sustainably and significantly improves line performance, while qualitative evidence suggests that privacy is important in supporting productive deviance, localized experimentation, distraction avoidance, and continuous improvement. I discuss implications of these results for theory on learning and control and suggest directions for future research.

Workplace transparency provides a foundation for learning and control, and therefore for satisfaction and productivity. Yet my research shows that an obsession with transparency-enhancing tools and structures can backfire, producing the unintended consequences of too much digital and physical visibility at work.

When transparency serves organizations effectively, why does it work so well? And when it doesn’t, why does it disappoint? Using multiple methods to address those two questions, my research is centered on the idea that transparency not only reveals but also changes employee behavior, like a bright light that helps you study a painting but can also alter or fade the colors. Just as museums must balance the need to view artwork with the need to protect it, so must organizations balance the need to observe employees with the need to provide privacy. 

Organizations that privilege the observers over the observed find themselves susceptible to what I have called a transparency paradox or transparency trap: environments that leave employees feeling overly exposed may lead people to actively conceal what they are doing—even when making improvements—thus reducing productivity and, paradoxically, transparency. 

However, organizations may create other problems for themselves by shying away from useful forms of transparency because of assumptions about stigmatization, for example, or public shaming. My research shows how making employee transgressions transparent—a modern-day version of having people wear scarlet letters—can, through a mechanism called personal narrative control, increase the odds of rehabilitation and prevent bad behavior from reoccurring.

This work is ongoing, as I continue to conduct research to make transparency transparent.

A common theme that integrates my research and course development is how increasingly transparent workplaces can improve productivity and performance by putting up certain boundaries to observation. While the research above empirically and theoretically explores the unintended consequences of having too much transparency at work, the work below suggests what is to be done about those problems. Specifically, it identifies ways in which managers and employees (the observers and the observed) can create zones of privacy to strike a balance between the often-competing needs for transparency and privacy.

These “zones” can be defined by physical boundaries, and so some of my research focuses on office spaces themselves. My work on open environments—The Impact of the “Open” Workspace on Human Collaboration and The Truth About Open Offices—demonstrates how such spaces can counterintuitively undermine the collaboration they are meant to promote and can thus constrain problem solving. Indeed, my research on remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic shows how productive and creative people can be when given sufficient physical privacy.

These “zones” can also be digital. In other research, I focus on how organizations manage access to employee data. For example, a study of police body-worn cameras shows that employee monitoring—which is known to reduce feelings of autonomy and therefore motivation and productivity—can also reduce polarization and therefore improve motivation and productivity when employees (not just managers) get to see and use the data to make decisions at work.

In all of this, the role and work of a manager continues to evolve, thanks in no small part to emerging workplace technologies. As organizations keep redrawing or removing boundaries between employees and information—sometimes doing away with managers’ traditional gatekeeping function—the results do not cease to surprise. For example, a recent study shows that employees who have direct access to their daily performance data—data that were previously available only through their managers—are inclined to “conform, not excel,” although performance outcomes differ depending on the employee’s personality and the quality of the relationship with the manager.

While investigating how workplace transparency and privacy shape organizational behavior and performance, I wondered about the related effects of workplace connectivity. As new digital tools and organizational forms make it far easier for employees to communicate and interact (and harder for them to avoid doing so), how are patterns of collaboration changing? And what is the impact on complex problem-solving, routines, and performance outcomes? With individuals using technology to span physical, structural, temporal, and other boundaries in organizations, those traditional elements of organizational design are becoming less likely to constrain decisions about who collaborates with whom. As a result, people often experience work relationships as unbounded. How does that, I began to ask, affect learning, control, satisfaction, and productivity?

So I started to build—as a corollary to my transparency work—a body of work to understand the practices and circumstances that make connectivity beneficial or detrimental, while both drawing on and contributing to the literature on social networks and intraorganizational collaboration. As with transparency, I considered whether the value of workplace connectivity should be less defined in good/bad terms and more along a context-driven spectrum (e.g., How much connectivity would be productive given the contingencies at play?). That, in turn, led me to think about what sorts of fluid collaborative structures (which facilitate connectivity in some parts of organizations while limiting it in others) could produce strong performance—and what conditions might allow that to happen. I took a fresh look at theories of how different structures for employee interaction (like the degree of clustering, centralization, or intermittency) affect organizational performance. What structuring mechanisms, I asked, might managers use to dynamically adjust connectivity—in place of more static, traditional approaches to organizational design—to achieve desired outcomes?

To solve complex problems, organizations must both collect facts and use them to solve problems. In one study, my coauthors and I show that increased connectivity—measured as network clustering, or the degree to which people overlap in their connections—has opposite effects on “facts” (looking for information) and “figuring” (looking for solutions). The search for facts becomes more efficient, because information travels fast in a clustered network, creating less redundancy. But the figuring often suffers, because theories and interpretations circulate quickly, too, reducing the diversity of alternatives. Hyperconnectivity can be bad, then, for generating solutions—and boundaries blocking that connectivity can actually be productive.

Solving complex problems also requires the ability to adapt to a shifting environment: as the problem changes, so, typically, does the best solution. It is widely assumed that decentralized organizational structures (with people connecting more through individual and small-group interactions on the front lines than through a “core” system or process) are more adaptive than centralized ones, but that is often not the case. My research shows that centralized communication networks can, when information flows in both directions, achieve the benefits of connectivity (promoting learning and knowledge sharing, for instance) without incurring the costs (such as succumbing to groupthink). But hierarchical structures aren’t necessarily the answer, either, because they often constrain information flow. So adaptability isn’t a matter of having a flatter or less-flat organization, but rather a more nuanced question of “leveling the flatter playing field” in particular ways.

Adaptive organizations experiment with different network structures when solving problems, with the understanding that networks play different roles for different individuals and groups. When individuals use them to search for solutions they could not find on their own, they can tap weak, diverse ties to generate more options and strong ties to understand particular options more deeply (which they may need to do when dealing with thornier challenges). At the collective level, as one would expect, things get more complicated. Although groups coordinate both within and beyond their membership to search for, evaluate, and converge on solutions, in complex problem-solving they benefit most (given their tendencies toward internal bias) from a network structure that maximizes external input and slows down consensus.

Such structural flexing to meet collaborative challenges is akin to some of the practices of great improvisation. It requires managers to have a “jazz mindset,” which allows room for spontaneous, organic interaction. As they improvise, looking for just the right amount of connectivity for each setting and situation, managers inevitably discover the tradeoffs associated with having too much or too little and must try to break those tradeoffs or at least work around them. My research suggests intermittency can help: rather than constructing fixed organizational structures and making minor adjustments every several years, managers can intermittently foster connectivity and provide quiet “focus” time for employees to meet needs as they arise day to day.

The Managing Human Capital course has been specifically designed to teach practical skills for the future general manager (not just the human resource practitioner) who seeks to manage both other people and her or his own career with optimal effectiveness. We will explore, at a more advanced level than was possible in LEAD, those people-related issues and challenges that any good general manager should understand to be effective.

The term human capital implies that people have the capacity to drive organizational performance. The basic premise of this course is that how one manages others can be the source of sustainable competitive advantage for organizations and for individual leaders within them. Any and all students who believe they will need to effectively manage other people to produce superior business results (revenues, profits, growth) while also creating a unique place to work (such that superior business results are sustainable) should take this course.

Educational Objectives

The objective of Managing Human Capital can be captured in a simple question: How can I create places where talented people will gather, produce, develop, and thrive? 

While the question is simple in concept, it is remarkably difficult to execute. Future graduates of HBS, like the population at large, will have more and more choices about how to work and how to manage work, especially given advances in “big data,” AI, and other workplace technologies. They, and their companies--from the great global enterprises of the 21st century to the smallest entrepreneurial venture--will struggle with common questions and concerns about the people who work in their organizations, such as:

• Module 1 (Hiring): What kind of people do I need, and how do I hire them?
• Module 2 (Socialization): How do I effectively on-board them, setting them up for success?
• Module 3 (Performance Management): How do I keep them fully engaged and productive?
• Module 4 (Compensation and Rewards): How do I make sure they are properly incented to do what the organization needs them to do?
• Module 5 (Coaching Effective Managers and Talent Development): How do I develop them over time, so they are prepared to take on bigger roles down the road? How do I let go of those who are not contributing?
• Module 6 (Structure): How do I architect my group, team, division, or organization to make the management of human capital easier, not harder?
• Module 7 (Reimagining the Management of Human Capital): How do I use “Future of Work” trends to my benefit and to my organization's advantage? How can I be ready for the way human capital will be managed when I come back for my 10th or 20th MBA reunion--and what experiments should I conduct in my teams and organizations in the interim to stay on the leading edge (without accidentally reinventing the wheel and rediscovering things we already knew)?

In each module, we will intentionally discuss cases that frame both traditional and bleeding-edge “Future of Work” approaches to each human capital challenge. The ‘answer’ will often lie somewhere in-between the extremes, but will-with regularity-come back to a set of guiding criteria that connect how human capital is managed with the goal of organizational performance.

In each module, and indeed within almost every session, we will explore these topics through three lenses: managing others, being managed by others, and managing our own human capital.

Professor Bernstein taught Leadership and Organizational Behavior (LEAD) from 2013-2016 (7 sections).  This course focuses on how managers become effective leaders by addressing the human side of enterprise.

The course is divided into five modules:
Leading Teams: In a world where most problems faced by organizations are too complex for a single individual to tackle alone, leadership frequently involves forming, mandating, and managing teams. And yet teams are fickle. Even as teams become more and more common at all levels of organizations, a shocking number of them fail to live up to their potential or even deliver at all. Small differences in the leadership of teams can have large consequences for the success of their efforts. In six class sessions, we build an understanding of how leadership of team identity/design and team processes can significantly improve team effectiveness and the chances of becoming a high-performing team.

Enhancing Interpersonal Effectiveness: Those in charge have always depended on others to get work done. This means building a network of effective work relationships. The segment begins by identifying the critical ingredients for building effective relationships with superiors, colleagues, and subordinates. We will look at various interpersonal relationships from different perspectives, including hierarchical, demographic, and cultural aspects, exploring the nuances of working with those from varied demographic backgrounds and the advantages and disadvantages of different communication and influence strategies. The aim of this segment is to enable managers to successfully build effective work relationships as they apply to managing in all directions.

Leading, Designing, and Aligning Organizations: This module explores in depth what it takes to be an effective leader. This segment will also examine what it takes to achieve “congruence” among an organization's elements:  its strategy, critical tasks, formal organization, people, and culture. We will study a number of leaders “in action” to gain insight into the critical functions and personal qualities that contribute to effective leadership. To be effective, the critical elements of an organization need to be in alignment.

Leading Change: Leaders’ attempts to renew or change their organizations often fail. In this segment of the course we will compare and contrast efforts to transform organizations in order to identify critical stages and activities in the change process. We will identify different approaches for developing and communicating a vision for an organization and for motivating people to fulfill that vision. We address the following questions: What are the primary sources of resistance to change? What are the most appropriate ways for overcoming them? What change strategies “work” and under what conditions?

Developing Your Path: In this final module, we will focus on several strategic issues involved in building a dynamic career, paying particular attention to early- and mid-career choices and dilemmas. We will consider the following topics:  How do individuals learn to lead? What critical experiences and relationships are needed?

The LEAD course has the following six goals:

• The course offers a realistic preview of what it means to manage
• The course helps students begin to transform professional identity from individual contributor to manager
• The course helps students confront both the task learning and personal learning involved in becoming a manager
• The course addresses the process of developing effective relationships with a diverse collection of individuals and groups
• The course helps students develop an understanding of what it takes to be an effective leader
• The course helps students learn how to be proactive and entrepreneurial in developing your leadership talents over the course of your career

Professor Bernstein took particular joy in teaching LEAD as he was a student in the LEAD course in the fall of 2000 (Section D).