Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,251)
- Faculty Publications (378)
- December 2009
- Article
Hiding the Evidence of Valid Theories: How Coupled Search Processes Obscure Performance Differences Among Organizations
By: Nicolaj Siggelkow and Jan Rivkin
Theorists argue that an organization's high-level choices, such as its organizational design or the attributes of its top management team, should influence its performance, yet empirical researchers have struggled to detect such influence. The impact of high-level... View Details
- August 2009 (Revised February 2011)
- Background Note
Managing Organizational Human Capital: Research Resources
By: Boris Groysberg and Ann Cullen
This technical note provides a list of library resources for researching various aspects of managing human capital within organizations. View Details
- July – August 2009
- Article
Organizational Ambidexterity: Balancing Exploitation and Exploration for Sustained Performance
By: Sebastian Raisch, Julian Birkinshaw, Gilbert Probst and Michael Tushman
Organizational ambidexterity has emerged as a new research paradigm in organization theory, yet several issues that are fundamental to this debate remain controversial. We explore four central tensions here: Should organizations achieve ambidexterity through... View Details
- June 2009 (Revised April 2019)
- Case
Crosley
By: Tom Nicholas and David Chen
In October 1941, a top secret envoy from the U.S. military was sent to Crosley Corporation in Cincinnati, Ohio to request their assistance to construct a weapon that would drastically strengthen the defenses of U.S. troops: the proximity fuze. Such a fuze would allow... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Don't Just Survive - Thrive: Leading Innovation in Good Times and Bad
By: Lynda M. Applegate and J. Bruce Harreld
Battered by contracting markets and frozen credit, many businesses today are fighting for survival. Indeed, the current global financial crisis provides a mandate for restructuring. But survival is not the end goal. In fact, cost cutting and restructuring are simply... View Details
- April 2009
- Journal Article
Perspectives on the Productivity Dilemma
By: Paul S. Adler, Mary Benner, David James Brunner, John Paul MacDuffie, Emi Osono, Bradley R. Staats, Hirotaka Takeuchi, Michael Tushman and Sidney G. Winter
For more than a century, operations researchers have recognized that organizations can increase efficiency by adhering strictly to proven process templates, thereby rendering operations more stable and predictable. For several decades, researchers have also recognized... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Taking a 'Deep Dive': What Only a Top Leader Can Do
By: Howard H. Yu and Joseph L. Bower
Unlike most historical accounts of strategic change inside large firms, empirical research on strategic management rarely uses the day-to-day behaviors of top executives as the unit of analysis. By examining the resource allocation process closely, we introduce the... View Details
- January 2009 (Revised June 2010)
- Case
Cisco Systems (2001): Building and Sustaining a Customer-Centric Culture
By: Ranjay Gulati
Customer centricity has been an important part of the culture at Cisco Systems since its inception. While part of this is attributable to values put in place by the founders and retained by subsequent management, it is also closely interwoven with its organizational... View Details
- 2009
- Article
Acting Globally but Thinking Locally? The Enduring Influence of Local Communities on Organizations
By: Christopher Marquis and Julie Battilana
We develop an institutionally oriented theory of how and why local communities continue to matter for organizations in a global age. Since globalization has taken center stage in both practitioner and academic circles, research has shifted away from understanding... View Details
- 2009
- Chapter
Creativity, Improvisation, and Organizations
By: Colin M. Fisher and Teresa M. Amabile
Although the literatures on both organizational creativity and organizational improvisation have been expanding in recent years, the links between these literatures have not been deeply explored. This chapter explores those links to create a conceptualization of... View Details
- 2009
- Article
Implicit Affect in Organizations
By: Sigal G. Barsade, Lakshmi Ramarajan and Drew Westen
Our goal is to integrate the construct of implicit affect—affective processes activated or processed outside of conscious awareness that influence ongoing thought, behavior, and conscious emotional experience—into the field of organizational behavior. We begin by... View Details
- 2009
- Article
Silenced by Fear: The Nature, Sources, and Consequences of Fear at Work
By: Jennifer Kish Gephart, James R. Detert, Linda K. Trevino and Amy C. Edmondson
In every organization, individual members have the potential to speak up about important issues, but a growing body of research suggests that they often remain silent instead, out of fear of negative personal and professional consequences. In this chapter, we draw on... View Details
Keywords: Organizations; Working Conditions; Research; Emotions; Employees; Motivation and Incentives; Theory; Behavior
- 2008
- Chapter
Corporate Honesty and Business Education: A Behavioral Model
By: Rakesh Khurana and Herbert Gintis
Since the mid-1970s neoclassical economic theory has dominated business school thinking and teaching in dealing with the nature of human motivation. However valuable in understanding competitive product and financial markets, neoclassical economic theory employs an... View Details
- 2008
- Book
Ownership Quotient: Putting the Service Profit Chain to Work for Unbeatable Competitive Advantage
By: James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser Jr. and Joe Wheeler
Hundreds of large organizations worldwide have used the groundbreaking Service Profit Chain to improve business performance. Now The Ownership Quotient reveals the next generation of the chain: customer and employee "owners" of your business. Employee-owners exhibit... View Details
- November 2008 (Revised September 2014)
- Background Note
Differences at Work: The Leadership Challenge
By: Sandra J. Sucher
This note reviews research findings on the leadership challenges of diversity, including the social psychology of similarity and difference, the value of multiple perspectives to problem-solving, the relationship between diversity and firm performance, and management... View Details
- October 2008
- Article
Gender in Job Negotiations: A Two-Level Game
By: Hannah Riley Bowles and Kathleen McGinn
We propose taking a two-level-game perspective on gender in job negotiations. At Level One, candidates negotiate with employers. At Level Two, candidates negotiate with household members. In order to illuminate the interplay between these two levels, we review research... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
Open to Negotiation: Phenomenological Assumptions and Knowledge Dissemination
By: Corinne Bendersky and Kathleen L. McGinn
Phenomenological assumptions-assumptions about the fundamental qualities of the phenomenon being studied and how it relates to the environment in which it occurs-affect the dissemination of knowledge from subfields to the broader field of study. Micro-process research... View Details
- September 2008
- Case
Pfizer Inc: Building an Innovation Center
By: Stefan H. Thomke and Ashok Nimgade
The case describes Pfizer's efforts to build and run an innovation center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As the center goes through different periods of leadership and strategic models, its relationship with the corporation and other research sites is explored. The case... View Details
- 2008
- Chapter
When Learning and Performance Are at Odds: Confronting the Tension
By: Sara Jean Singer and A. C. Edmondson
This chapter explores complexities of the relationship between learning and performance. We start with the general proposition that learning promotes performance and then describe several challenges for researchers and managers who wish to study or promote learning in... View Details