Publications

Article

The Error at the Heart of Corporate Leadership

By: Joseph L. Bower and Lynn S. Paine

Agency theory, a new model of governance promulgated by academic economists in the 1970s, is behind the idea that corporate managers should make shareholder value their primary concern and that boards should ensure they do. The theory regards shareholders as owners of... View Details

Keywords: Agency Theory; Business and Shareholder Relations; Leadership; Corporate Governance

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March–April 2023
Article

You Need Two Leadership Gears: Know When to Take Charge and When to Get Out of the Way

By: Lindy Greer, Francesca Gino and Robert Sutton

The debate about the best way to lead has been raging for years: Should you empower your people and get out of their way, or take charge and push them to do great work? The answer, say the authors, is to do both. Their research shows that effective leaders routinely... View Details

Keywords: Leadership Style; Groups and Teams; Organizational Structure

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2022
Book

Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop

By: Max H. Bazerman

It is easy to condemn obvious wrongdoers such as Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann, Harvey Weinstein, and the Sackler family. But we rarely think about the many people who supported their unethical or criminal behavior. In each case there was a supporting cast of... View Details

Keywords: Complicity; Enabling; Ethics; Behavior; Personal Characteristics; Society

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2005
Chapter

On Coaches, Counsellors, Facilitators and Behavioural Consultants.

Executive coaches, career counsellors, psychotherapists, group facilitators and behavioural consultants all have overlapping, yet different areas of expertise. To make an informed decision about the kind of long-term leadership development program you want, it is... View Details

Keywords: Experience and Expertise; Decisions; Learning; Leadership Development; Outcome or Result; Programs; Behavior

October 2013
Article

When Power Makes Others Speechless: The Negative Impact of Leader Power on Team Performance

By: Leigh Plunkett Tost, Francesca Gino and Richard P. Larrick

We examine the impact of subjective power on leadership behavior and demonstrate that the psychological effect of power on leaders spills over to impact team effectiveness. Specifically, drawing from the approach/inhibition theory of power, power-devaluation theory,... View Details

Keywords: Power; Leadership; Team Performance; Groups and Teams; Performance; Leadership Style; Power and Influence

Article

Ethical Blind Spots: Explaining Unintentional Unethical Behavior

By: Ovul Sezer, F. Gino and Max H. Bazerman

People view themselves as more ethical, fair, and objective than others, yet often act against their moral compass. This paper reviews recent research on unintentional unethical behavior and provides an overview of the conditions under which ethical blind spots lead... View Details

Keywords: Behavior; Ethics; Decision Choices and Conditions

Aug 2017
Conference Presentation

To Highlight or Downplay Differences? A Threat-Matching Model for Crafting Diversity Approaches

By: J. Lees and E. Apfelbaum

We integrate organizational and psychological scholarship to devise the threat matching model, a contingency theory that illustrates when, how, and which diversity approaches—frameworks leaders provide employees to understand and respond to diversity—promote... View Details

Keywords: Race And Ethnicity; Inclusion; Diversity; Gender; Race; Ethnicity; Equality and Inequality; Leadership

14 May 2015
Working Paper Summaries

Humblebragging: A Distinct-and Ineffective-Self-Presentation Strategy

Keywords: by Ovul Sezer, Francesca Gino & Michael I. Norton

Research Summary

Current Research

By: Leslie K. John

Professor John is a behavioral scientist who uses both laboratory and field experiments to investigate questions that are at the intersection of marketing, organizational behavior, and public policy.

Professor John’s work has been published in leading... View Details

Research Summary

Career and Personal Renewal at Mid-Life

Carl S. Sloane has been studying mid- and late-life transitions in careers and life structures. Two central issues identified in his research, and reflected in the instructional materials for the executive education workshop Age of Options, are (1) the relationship... View Details

Article

Untapped Potential in the Study of Negotiation and Gender Inequality in Organizations

By: Hannah Riley Bowles and Kathleen L. McGinn

Negotiation is a process that creates, reinforces, and reduces gender inequality in organizations, yet the study of gender in negotiation has little connection to the study of gender in organizations. We review the literature on gender in job negotiations from... View Details

Keywords: Gender; Body of Literature; Negotiation Process; Organizational Culture; Research; Behavior; Equality and Inequality

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Article

The What and Why of Self-deception

By: Zoë Chance and Michael I. Norton

Scholars from many disciplines have investigated self-deception, but defining self-deception and establishing its possible benefits have been a matter of heated debate—a debate impoverished by a relative lack of empirical research. Drawing on recent research, we first... View Details

Keywords: Cognition and Thinking

January 2019
Article

The ABCs of Financial Education: Experimental Evidence on Attitudes, Behavior, and Cognitive Biases

By: Fenella Carpena, Shawn A. Cole, Jeremy Shapiro and Bilal Zia

This paper uses a large-scale field experiment in India to study attitudinal, behavioral, and cognitive constraints that can stymie the link between financial education and financial outcomes. The study complements financial education with (1) financial incentives on a... View Details

Keywords: Finance; Education; Attitudes; Behavior; Outcome or Result

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Article

Emodiversity and the Emotional Ecosystem

By: Jordi Quoidbach, June Gruber, Moira Mikolajczak, Alexsandr Kogan, Ilios Kotsou and Michael I. Norton

Bridging psychological research exploring emotional complexity and research in the natural sciences on the measurement of biodiversity, we introduce—and demonstrate the benefits of—emodiversity: the variety and relative abundance of the emotions that humans experience.... View Details

Keywords: Health; Diversity; Emotions