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- All HBS Web (121)
- Faculty Publications (37)
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- All HBS Web (121)
- Faculty Publications (37)
- 16 Feb 2016
- Working Paper Summaries
Diversity and Team Performance in a Kenyan Organization
- 2014
- Book
Accelerate: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World
By: John P. Kotter
Based on the award-winning article in Harvard Business Review, from global leadership expert John Kotter. It's a familiar scene in organizations today: a new competitive threat or a big opportunity emerges. You quickly create a strategic initiative in response and... View Details
Kotter, John P. Accelerate: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World. Harvard Business Review Press, 2014.
- 06 Sep 2016
- News
Why psychological safety matters and what to do about it
- 2008
- Working Paper
The Flattening Firm and Product Market Competition: The Effect of Trade Liberalization
By: Maria Guadalupe and Julie Wulf
This paper establishes a causal effect of competition from trade liberalization on various characteristics of organizational design. We exploit a unique panel dataset on firm hierarchies (1986-1999) of large U.S. firms and find that increasing competition leads firms... View Details
Keywords: Trade; Managerial Roles; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Business Strategy; Competitive Strategy
Guadalupe, Maria, and Julie Wulf. "The Flattening Firm and Product Market Competition: The Effect of Trade Liberalization." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 09-067, November 2008.
Self-Managing Organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing
Fascination with organizations that eschew the conventional managerial hierarchy and instead radically decentralize authority has been longstanding, albeit at the margins of scholarly and practitioner attention. Recently, however, organizational experiments in... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Empowering Bureaucracy: Achieving Non-Hierarchical Control and Employee Autonomy Through Dynamic Formal Roles
By: Michael Lee
Hierarchy and formal structure are conventionally viewed as two tightly coupled dimensions of organization design. As organizations move from more hierarchical to less hierarchical authority structures, they also tend to reduce formal structure. However, organic... View Details
- Fall 2012
- Article
The Flattening Firm—Not As Advertised
By: Julie Wulf
For decades, management consultants and the popular business press have urged large firms to flatten their hierarchies. Flattening (or delayering, as it is also known) typically refers to the elimination of layers in a firm's organizational hierarchy and the broadening... View Details
Wulf, Julie. "The Flattening Firm—Not As Advertised." California Management Review 55, no. 1 (Fall 2012): 5–23.
- 28 Jul 2010
- Working Paper Summaries
Disagreement about the Team’s Status Hierarchy: An Insidious Obstacle to Coordination and Performance
Keywords: by Heidi K. Gardner
- August 2023
- Article
Status and Mortality: Is There a Whitehall Effect in the United States?
By: Tom Nicholas
The influential Whitehall studies found that top-ranking civil servants in Britain experienced lower mortality than civil servants below them in the organizational hierarchy due to differential exposure to workplace stress. I test for a Whitehall effect in the United... View Details
Nicholas, Tom. "Status and Mortality: Is There a Whitehall Effect in the United States?" Economic History Review 76, no. 3 (August 2023): 1191–1230.
- Research Summary
Dissertation: Speaking Up on Boards
My dissertation examines individual and group behavior in corporate boards of directors. I focus on individual traits and group traits that can foster or inhibit the act of speaking up when an individuals views go against the general consensus in the room. Research and... View Details
- 10 Apr 2014
- Research & Ideas
John Kotter’s Plan to Accelerate Your Business
organizational design that has not one, but two "operating systems." One system conducts the everyday business of business, while the second system, more like an agile network, sits alongside to focus on the opportunities and demands of... View Details
Keywords: by Kim Girard
- April 2025
- Case
Radical Transformation at Bayer: Dynamic Shared Ownership
By: Boris Groysberg and Gamze Yucaoglu
In 2023, Bill Anderson became CEO of Bayer AG, a 160-year-old life sciences giant looking to strengthen its pharma pipeline, manage debt, and cut through bureaucracy. His bold response: Dynamic Shared Ownership (DSO), a radical model replacing traditional hierarchies... View Details
Keywords: Human Resources; Business Strategy; Alignment; Innovation and Management; Organizational Structure; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry
Groysberg, Boris, and Gamze Yucaoglu. "Radical Transformation at Bayer: Dynamic Shared Ownership." Harvard Business School Case 425-061, April 2025.
- 02 Apr 2009
- Working Paper Summaries
The Flattening Firm and Product Market Competition: The Effect of Trade Liberalization
Keywords: by Maria Guadalupe & Julie M. Wulf
- 19 Dec 2013
- Working Paper Summaries
Innovating Without Information Constraints: Organizations, Communities, and Innovation When Information Costs Approach Zero
- 2005
- Working Paper
Silent Saboteurs: How Implicit Theories of Voice Inhibit the Upward Flow of Knowledge in Organizations
By: James R. Detert and Amy C. Edmondson
This article examines, in a series of three studies, how people working in organizational hierarchies wrestle with the challenge of upward voice. We first undertook in-depth exploratory research in a knowledge-intensive multinational corporation in which employee input... View Details
Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Working Conditions; Knowledge Management; Attitudes; Organizational Culture
Detert, James R., and Amy C. Edmondson. "Silent Saboteurs: How Implicit Theories of Voice Inhibit the Upward Flow of Knowledge in Organizations." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 06-024, December 2005. (Revised October 2006, December 2008.)
- Article
Management Practices, Relational Contracts and the Decline of General Motors
By: Susan Helper and Rebecca Henderson
General Motors was once regarded as one of the best managed and most successful firms in the world, but between 1980 and 2009 its share of the U.S. market fell from 62.6% to 19.8%, and in 2009 the firm went bankrupt. In this paper we argue that the conventional... View Details
Keywords: Organizational Design; Management Practices and Processes; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Manufacturing Industry; Auto Industry; United States
Helper, Susan, and Rebecca Henderson. "Management Practices, Relational Contracts and the Decline of General Motors." Journal of Economic Perspectives 28, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 49–72.
- December 2014
- Article
The Distinct Effects of Information Technology and Communication Technology on Firm Organization
By: Nicholas Bloom, Luis Garicano, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen
Empirical studies on information communication technologies (ICT) typically aggregate the "information" and "communication" components together. We show theoretically and empirically that this is problematic. Information and communication technologies have very... View Details
Bloom, Nicholas, Luis Garicano, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen. "The Distinct Effects of Information Technology and Communication Technology on Firm Organization." Management Science 60, no. 12 (December 2014): 2859–2885.
- 2025
- Working Paper
Generative AI and the Nature of Work
By: Manuel Hoffmann, Sam Boysel, Frank Nagle, Sida Peng and Kevin Xu
Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technology demonstrate a considerable potential
to complement human capital intensive activities. While an emerging literature documents wide-ranging
productivity effects of AI, relatively little attention has been paid... View Details
Keywords: Generative Ai; Digital Work; Open Source Software; Knowledge Economy; AI and Machine Learning; Open Source Distribution; Organizational Structure; Performance Productivity; Labor
Hoffmann, Manuel, Sam Boysel, Frank Nagle, Sida Peng, and Kevin Xu. "Generative AI and the Nature of Work." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 25-021, October 2024. (Revised April 2025.)
- 2014
- Working Paper
Management Practices, Relational Contracts and the Decline of General Motors
By: Susan Helper and Rebecca Henderson
General Motors was once regarded as one of the best managed and most successful firms in the world, but between 1980 and 2009 its share of the US market fell from 62.6 to 19.8 percent, and in 2009 the firm went bankrupt. In this paper we argue that the conventional... View Details
Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Management Practices and Processes; Organizational Structure; Decision Making; Insolvency and Bankruptcy; Manufacturing Industry; Auto Industry
Helper, Susan, and Rebecca Henderson. "Management Practices, Relational Contracts and the Decline of General Motors." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 14-062, January 2014. (NBER Working Paper Series, No. 19867, January 2014.)
- 31 Mar 2002
- Research & Ideas
You’re Wasting Your Employees! What You Can Do About It
operations of any company that wishes to flourish in the new age. And yet, a decade of organizational delayering, destaffing, restructuring, and reengineering has produced employees who are more exhausted than empowered, more cynical than... View Details