Publications

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Article

Prosocial Spending and Buying Time: Money as a Tool for Increasing Subjective Well-Being

By: Elizabeth Dunn, A.V. Whillans, Michael I. Norton and Lara B. Aknin

Researchers have long been interested in the relationship between income and happiness, but a newer wave of work suggests that how people use their money also matters. We discuss the three primary areas in which psychologists have explored the relationship... View Details

Keywords: Wellbeing; Money; Spending; Decision Making; Happiness; Well-being

October 2020
Article

Task Selection and Workload: A Focus on Completing Easy Tasks Hurts Long-Term Performance

By: Diwas S. KC, Bradley R. Staats, Maryam Kouchaki and Francesca Gino

How individuals manage, organize, and complete their tasks is central to operations management. Recent research in operations focuses on how under conditions of increasing workload individuals can decrease their service time, up to a point, in order to complete work... View Details

Keywords: Healthcare; Knowledge Work; Discretion; Workload; Employees; Health Care and Treatment; Decision Making; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Productivity

July–August 2016
Article

Beyond the Holacracy Hype: The Overwrought Claims—and Actual Promise—of the Next Generation of Self-Managed Teams

By: Ethan Bernstein, John Bunch, Niko Canner and Michael Lee

Holacracy and other forms of self-organization have been getting a lot of press. Proponents hail them as "flat" environments that foster flexibility, engagement, productivity, and efficiency. Critics say they're naive, unrealistic experiments. We argue, using evidence... View Details

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12 Aug 2008
First Look

First Look: August 12, 2008

accurately reflect the demographic diversity of the U.S. population. Yet, most research on diversity in organizations has focused on the outcomes associated with workforce diversity and not on the processes that can enhance diversity in... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

September–October 2017
Article

Why Do We Undervalue Competent Management?: Neither Great Leadership Nor Brilliant Strategy Matters Without Operational Excellence

By: Raffaella Sadun, Nicholas Bloom and John Van Reenen

A recurring message in business education is that you can’t compete on the basis of management processes because they’re easily copied. Operational effectiveness is table stakes in the competitive universe, it is often assumed, and thus cannot serve as a sustainable... View Details

Keywords: Management; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques; Management Practices and Processes; Performance Effectiveness

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Research Summary

Reforming Social Science

By: Max H. Bazerman

Social science research affects all of us. When researchers learned organ donation rates are higher in countries where human organs are automatically available for donation unless you specifically “opt-out” of the system, as opposed to countries like the U.S., where... View Details

Research Summary

Trust

By: Sandra J. Sucher

In this research, I aim to provide a practical orientation to trust—how to build it, how it can be damaged, how it might be repaired—grounded in my experience as an executive and in the research on organizational trust and moral philosophy. As a case researcher, I... View Details

18 Jun 2014
Research & Ideas

Book Excerpt: ‘Collective Genius’

book excerpt Leading Innovation From Collective Genius: The Art of Practice of Leading Innovation By Linda A. Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove and Kent Linebeck Though each of our leaders and their firms differed in key ways, all... View Details

Keywords: by Linda Hill; Entertainment & Recreation

20 Apr 2011
Research & Ideas

Blind Spots: We’re Not as Ethical as We Think

to discuss some of the ideas behind the book. A book excerpt follows. Sean Silverthorne: Why did you write this book, and who should read it? Max Bazerman: Research over the last two decades has documented that good people do bad things... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

28 May 2012
Research & Ideas

A Pragmatic Alternative for Creating a Corporate Social Responsibility Strategy

companies do CSR in fits and starts” The problem? They lack a cohesive CSR strategy, says Rangan, who recently cowrote the working paper Why Every Company Needs a CSR Strategy and How to Build It with HBS research associate Lisa A. Chase... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

Research Summary

Overview

By: Eva Ascarza

Professor Ascarza’s research primarily focuses on providing researchers and marketers a better understanding of how to manage customer retention so as to reduce churn and increase firm’s profitability. She addresses these issues by building empirical models of customer... View Details

Keywords: Customer Retention; Churn; Field Experiments

04 May 2007
What Do You Think?

How Do Managers Think?

medicine allow doctors to be hands-on today with what will be their job tomorrow . Will future managers have the privilege to experience and acquire practical understanding within real-life companies (as a) complementary device to... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett

2021
Working Paper

Accounting for Organizational Employment Impact

By: David Freiberg, Katie Panella, George Serafeim and T. Robert Zochowski

Organizations create significant positive and negative impacts through their employment practices. This paper builds on the substantial body of research regarding job quality and impact measurement to present a framework for monetized analysis of employment impact. We... View Details

Keywords: Impact-Weighted Accounts; IWAI; Employment Impact; Employment; Jobs and Positions; Quality; Measurement and Metrics; Analysis; Framework

SSRN

2014
Discussion Paper

The Promise of Microfinance and Women's Empowerment: What Does the Evidence Say?

By: Dina D. Pomeranz

The microfinance revolution has transformed access to financial services for low-income populations worldwide. As a result, it has become one of the most talked-about innovations in global development in recent decades. However, its expansion has not been without... View Details

May 2013
Article

Sweatshop Labor Is Wrong Unless the Shoes Are Cute: Cognition Can Both Hurt and Help Motivated Moral Reasoning

By: Neeru Paharia, Kathleen Vohs and Rohit Deshpandé

The present research investigated the dual role of cognition as either an enabler of moral reasoning or self-interested motivated reasoning for endorsing sweatshop labor. Experiment 1A showed motivated reasoning: participants were more likely to endorse the use of... View Details

Keywords: Moral Sensibility; Motivation and Incentives; Working Conditions; Cognition and Thinking

2019
Article

Can Big Data Improve Firm Decision Quality? The Role of Data Quality and Data Diagnosticity

By: Maryam Ghasemaghaei and Goran Calic

Anecdotal evidence suggests that, despite the large variety of data, the huge volume of generated data, and the fast velocity of obtaining data (i.e., big data), quality of big data is far from perfect. Therefore, many firms defer collecting and integrating big data as... View Details

Keywords: Big Data; Analytics and Data Science; Decisions; Quality

05 Mar 2010
Working Paper Summaries

Will I Stay or Will I Go? Cooperative and Competitive Effects of Workgroup Sex and Race Composition on Turnover

Keywords: by Kathleen L. McGinn & Katherine L. Milkman

February 2018
Article

Retention Futility: Targeting High-Risk Customers Might Be Ineffective.

By: Eva Ascarza

Companies in a variety of sectors are increasingly managing customer churn proactively, generally by detecting customers at the highest risk of churning and targeting retention efforts towards them. While there is a vast literature on developing churn prediction models... View Details

Keywords: Retention/churn; Proactive Churn Management; Field Experiments; Heterogeneous Treatment Effect; Machine Learning; Customer Relationship Management; Risk Management