Publications

14 Nov 2023
What Do You Think?

Do We Underestimate the Importance of Generosity in Leadership?

related to boundaryless behavior.” We have over the years lauded the notion of boundaryless behaviors—sharing of talent, ideas, and other resources—in organizations. They involve putting the good of the organization above one’s own short-term welfare or View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

28 Sep 2010
First Look

First Look: September 28, 2010

research that has shown instances of intergroup equality, positive intergroup relations, and the high performance of diverse groups. (2) When is diversity positive (positive when)? This category describes organizational and... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

December 2021
Article

Employee Responses to Compensation Changes: Evidence from a Sales Firm

By: Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma, Nathan Seegert and Christopher Stanton

What are the long-term consequences of compensation changes? Using data from an inbound sales call center, we study employee responses to a compensation change that ultimately reduced take-home pay by 7% for the average affected worker. The change caused a significant... View Details

Keywords: Employees; Wages; Compensation and Benefits; Change; Performance; Resignation and Termination; Retention; Analysis

Article

How to (Inadvertently) Sabotage Your Organization

By: Stefan Thomke

Some of the biggest threats to organizational performance can and do come from within. In an age when companies are told to be agile, to learn from experiments, and to be entrepreneurial, we are still vulnerable to actions — deliberate or unintentional — that stem from... View Details

Keywords: Management Practices; Effective Managers; Self-awareness; CIA,; Organizational Behavior; Management Practices and Processes; Organizations; Behavior; Performance

08 Oct 2020
Research & Ideas

Keep Your Weary Workers Engaged and Motivated

by allocating rewards and resources for both traditional performance and for learning activities. What has changed and what hasn’t? The four drives themselves, fundamental to human psychology, have not changed. The COVID-19 pandemic has... View Details

Keywords: by Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams

March 2009 (Revised May 2011)
Case

Risk Management at Wellfleet Bank: Deciding about "Megadeals"

By: Anette Mikes

Inspired by one of the few banks that successfully weathered the 2007-2009 credit crisis, the case illustrates risk management in a corporate finance business. Chief executive Alastair Dowes has to decide if the risk governance process is adequate to uncover mega-risks... View Details

Keywords: Risk Management; Decision Making; Performance Evaluation; Credit; Balance and Stability; Integrated Corporate Reporting; Decision Choices and Conditions; Negotiation Offer; Performance Effectiveness; Corporate Finance; Banking Industry

Educators

Purchase

20 Jun 2005
Research & Ideas

Creating a Positive Professional Image

As HBS professor Laura Morgan Roberts sees it, if you aren't managing your own professional image, others are. "People are constantly observing your behavior and forming theories about your competence, character, and commitment, which are rapidly disseminated... View Details

Keywords: by Mallory Stark

2014
Working Paper

Speaking of Corporate Social Responsibility

By: Hao Liang, Christopher Marquis, Luc Renneboog and Sunny Li Sun

We argue that the language spoken by corporate decision makers influences their firms' social responsibility and sustainability practices. Linguists suggest that obligatory future-time-reference (FTR) in a language reduces the psychological importance of the future.... View Details

Keywords: Language; Future-Time-Reference; Categories; Culture; Corporate Social Responsibility; Sustainability; Communication; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact

SSRN

August 2004 (Revised September 2005)
Case

Stanley O'Neal at Merrill Lynch (A)

By: David A. Thomas and Ayesha Kanji

In the late 1970s, Stanley O'Neal joined Merrill Lynch as an investment banker. Profiles O'Neal's ascent at Merrill to CEO. O'Neal put Merrill through a comprehensive restructuring program, cutting costs and significantly reducing the work force. As CEO, O'Neal faces... View Details

Keywords: Restructuring; Race; Cost Management; Investment Banking; Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Leadership; Management Succession; Performance Effectiveness; Personal Development and Career

April 2008
Article

The Survey of Industrial R&D—Patent Database Link Project

By: William R. Kerr and Shihe Fu

This paper details the construction of a firm-year panel dataset combining the NBER Patent Dataset with the Survey of Industrial R&D conducted by the Census Bureau and National Science Foundation. The dataset constitutes a platform that offers an unprecedented view of... View Details

Keywords: Analytics and Data Science; Patents; Surveys; Research and Development; Innovation and Invention; Performance Productivity; Projects; Management Practices and Processes; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques

Rakesh Khurana is the Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development at the Harvard Business School. He is also Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, co-Master of Cabot House at Harvard College, and the Danoff Dean of Harvard College.

Professor... View Details

Keywords: executive search

Web

Negotiation, Organizations & Markets - Faculty & Research

practice. Keywords: Corporate Governance ; Law ; Business and Shareholder Relations Citation Find at Harvard Register to Read Related Ma, Yueran, and Andrei Shleifer. "The Invention of Corporate Governance." NBER Working Paper Series, No. 33710, April 2025. Gender and... View Details

September 2019 (Revised December 2022)
Case

Cooking Down a Storm: Changing Culture at Pasta Serafina (A)

By: Susanna Gallani, Francesca Gino and Raffaella Sadun

Plant management at Pasta Serafina, a pasta producer in the south of Italy, is struggling to contain employee absenteeism. While the misbehavior is concentrated in a minority of the workers, its effects impact not only the plant’s performance, but also the climate and... View Details

Keywords: Absenteeism; Moral Hazard; Employees; Behavior; Problems and Challenges; Organizational Culture; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Employee Relationship Management; Performance Productivity; Decision Making

Educators

Purchase

01 Nov 2021
What Do You Think?

How Long Does It Take to Improve an Organization’s Culture?

seem to be an obvious performance improvement effort? "An organization’s culture, among other things, touches every functional department ... and is often perceived as critical to its strategic direction." In my research on culture... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

July 2023 (Revised October 2024)
Case

Revenue Recognition at Stride Funding: Making Sense of Revenues for a Fintech Startup

By: Paul M. Healy and Jung Koo Kang

The case explores the challenges of revenue recognition and financial reporting for Stride Funding (Stride), a fintech startup that has disrupted the student loan market. Stride leveraged proprietary machine learning and financial models to underwrite alternative... View Details

Keywords: Revenue Recognition; Financial Reporting; Entrepreneurial Finance; Business Startups; Growth and Development Strategy; Governance Compliance; Accrual Accounting; Financial Services Industry; United States

Educators

Purchase

29 Jul 2019
Research & Ideas

How Companies Benefit When Employees Work Remotely

put their findings in perspective and offer a framework for future research, the researchers emphasized the nature of a patent examiner’s work, which requires little coordination with co-workers on a daily basis. Examiners perform their... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

May 2018
Article

Managing the Family Firm: Evidence from CEOs at Work

By: Oriana Bandiera, Renata Lemos, Andrea Prat and Raffaella Sadun

We present evidence on the labor supply of CEOs and on whether family and professional CEOs differ on this dimension. We do so through a new survey instrument that allows us to codify CEOs’ diaries in a detailed and comparable fashion and to build a bottom-up measure... View Details

Keywords: Performance Productivity; Family Ownership; Management

SSRN