Performance Incentives - Publications - Faculty & Research

14 Jul 2020
Research & Ideas

Restarting Under Uncertainty: Managerial Experiences from Around the World

local convenience stores, whose owners received incentives per order. This increased job efficiency by two or three times, as delivery moved from door-to-door to the pick-up station. Meanwhile, the work to pick and pack items also... View Details

Keywords: by Raffaella Sadun, Andrea Bertoni, Alexia Delfino, Giovanni Fassio, and Mariapaola Testa

14 Apr 2003
Research & Ideas

Pay-for-Performance Doesn’t Always Pay Off

something new to spur on their employees. According to Beer, managers in many companies look to pay-for-performance for good reasons. They expect that it will attract and motivate people. They expect performance standards will outweigh... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

03 May 2010
Research & Ideas

What Is the Future of MBA Education?

meeting, make a presentation, and give performance feedback. The third theme was the need for MBAs to develop a better sense of the realities of organizations within which leaders operate. Politics—issues of power, coalitions, and hidden... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Education

02 Jul 2013
First Look

First Look: July 2

Publications 2006 pub Matching Firms, Managers, and Incentives By: Bandiera, Oriana, Luigi Guiso, Andrea Prat, and Raffaella Sadun Abstract—We exploit a unique combination of administrative sources and survey data to study the match... View Details

Keywords: Anna Secino

01 Jul 2019
What Do You Think?

Are Super Stretch Goals Only for the Very Young?

beginnings and the incentives they foster. As he put it, “the hunger to rise is most strong in those who fight through the odds. That warm meal may lull someone better off to pause and rest a while ” Asrarqureshi attributed the success of... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

12 Apr 2004
Research & Ideas

Waking Up a Sleeping Company

issue of Medtronic's performance standards, I found that goals and deadlines were routinely set, missed, and then simply adjusted. Poor performance was rationalized by excuses. Even View Details

Keywords: by Bill George

30 Jan 2012
Research & Ideas

Measuring the Efficacy of the World’s Managers

rewarding high-performing teachers, and retraining and/or firing badly performing teachers," the paper states. In the United States, India, and China, managerial use of incentives are much more common... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

06 Dec 2004
What Do You Think?

Why Do Managers Fail to Act on Their Predictions?

or not on my watch anyhow." (Jamal Barghouti). A dominant theme concerned the bias in the market toward addressing short-term challenges, caused in large part by what Robin Chacko described as the "impatient" investor. As Sarang Kulkarni put it,... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

01 Mar 2017
Research & Ideas

A Good Thing Happens When Doctors Start Talking to Their Patients

performing costly medical procedures. And that’s a problem, argues Senior Fellow Robert S. Kaplan, the Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School. “It becomes obvious that you can make the... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Health

27 Jan 2014
Research & Ideas

Family CEOs Spend Less Time at Work

a CEO's incentive to perform is in large part tied to what happens when he or she does not perform—a risk of getting ousted. But aligning a board to say we're going to start looking for someone else is a lot... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

22 Mar 2017
Research & Ideas

What's the Ideal Frequency for a Sales Quota?

quota. This raises a key question for sales managers: What kind of quota is the most motivating? Could salesforce performance be kick-started if that quota incentive was delivered more frequently? The answer... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

15 Oct 2001
Research & Ideas

Rethinking E-Leadership

you don't model the importance of sweating the details. Downturns expose the weaknesses in your internal systems, observes Chuang. Technical expertise—the ability to solve cash flow problems, interpret what customers are really saying, or set up effective View Details

Keywords: by Melissa Raffoni

19 Oct 2017
Research & Ideas

How Charitable Organizations Can Thwart Excuses for Not Giving

how much good the donation will achieve. “That gives you some moral wiggle room to pursue the more selfish action,” says Exley, an assistant professor in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at HBS. Her research attempts to improve the View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

June 1998
Article

Reward, Intrinsic Motivation, and Creativity

By: B. A. Hennessey and T. M. Amabile

Comments on R. Eisenberger and J. Cameron's (see record 1996-06440-007) discussion on the impact of reward on creativity. The authors argue that Eisenberger and Cameron overlooked or failed to adequately explain several demonstrations of lower creativity on rewarded... View Details

Keywords: Creativity; Motivation and Incentives; Performance Evaluation

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21 Jan 2013
Research & Ideas

Altruistic Capital: Harnessing Your Employees’ Intrinsic Goodwill

economic theory with field experiments. "Field experiments give you scientific rigor while being close to practice," says. "Unless you really have a bulletproof argument that you can't poke holes in, it's hard to change prior beliefs." Case in point is her research on... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

21 Sep 2009
Research & Ideas

Excessive Executive Pay: What’s the Solution?

conversations, they reflected on key issues. Edited excerpts follow. Brian Hall focuses his teaching and research on performance management and incentive systems. He has provided expert testimony on View Details

Keywords: by Roger Thompson

22 Aug 2011
Research & Ideas

Getting to Eureka!: How Companies Can Promote Creativity

into round holes. Employers have commonly sought to solve that motivation problem in one way: money. By using "pay-for-performance" schemes that reward workers for hitting targets in a project, they seek to provide that extra View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

07 Oct 2002
Research & Ideas

What Leaders Need to Do To Restore Investor Confidence

involved with options. No one change by itself will be enough. CEOs must address the organizational architecture: the planning systems; the performance measurement and evaluation systems; the incentives... View Details

Keywords: by Harvard Management Update

02 May 2011
Research & Ideas

Casino Payoff: Hands-Off Management Works Best

across the United States. Host Controls The job performances of casino hosts are subject to various degrees of monitoring, even within the same MGM-Mirage organization. The enterprise comprises a number of individual properties that were... View Details

Keywords: by Dennis Fisher; Entertainment & Recreation

July 2005 (Revised February 2009)
Case

Eureka Forbes Ltd.: Managing the Selling Effort (A)

By: Das Narayandas and Kerry Herman

The CEO of EFL (India), a direct sales organization, must decide which changes to the sales compensation systems would better motivate his sales reps and improve their sales performance. View Details

Keywords: Compensation and Benefits; Management; Performance Improvement; Sales; Motivation and Incentives; India

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