Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(479)
- Faculty Publications (109)
- January 22, 2020
- Article
Making Honest Conversations the Norm
By: Michael Beer
Much admired companies like Boeing and Wells Fargo sacrifice their competitive advantage. Some make huge ethical blunders. As a result, shareholders suffer huge losses in value while employees, customers, and society lose trust and confidence in the institution. Based... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Birds of a Feather ... Enforce Social Norms? Interactions Among Culture, Norms, and Strategy
By: Hongyi Li and Eric J. Van den Steen
This paper analyzes how shared beliefs and preferences (or values) cause the emergence of social norms; why people may enforce norms that go against their own beliefs and preferences/values; and how this may cause a disconnect to develop between the... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
On Her Own Account: How Strengthening Women's Financial Control Affects Labor Supply and Gender Norms
By: Natalia Rigol, Erica Field, Rohini Pande, Simone Schaner and Charity Troyer-Moore
Can greater control over earned income incentivize women to work and influence gender norms? In collaboration with Indian government partners, we provided rural women with individual bank accounts and randomly varied whether their wages from a public workfare program... View Details
- August 2019
- Case
Humanistic Capitalism at Brunello Cucinelli
By: Francesca Gino and Gary Pisano
This case explores one company’s attempt to experiment with a different underlying model for a capitalist enterprise. Brunello Cucinelli, S.p.A. is a leading manufacturer of luxury fashion apparel. Despite being a publicly traded enterprise with annual revenues... View Details
- June 2019 (Revised July 2019)
- Case
Building a Meritocracy at Alghanim Industries
By: Paul M. Healy, Susanna Gallani and Esel Çekin
Building on his father’s legacy, Omar Alghanim (MBA 2002) had been working on strengthening a performance-driven culture based on meritocracy in the family business, Alghanim Industries. The task had been particularly challenging because of traditional Middle East... View Details
- May–June 2019
- Article
U-Shaped Conformity in Online Social Networks
By: Monic Sun, Michael Zhang and Feng Zhu
We explore how people balance their needs to belong and to be different from their friends by studying their choices of a virtual-house wall color on a leading Chinese social-networking site. The setting enables us to randomize both the popular color and the adoption... View Details
- 2019
- Article
When Gender Diversity Makes Firms More Productive
By: Stephen Turban, Dan Wu and Letian Zhang
Does diversity make a company more productive? Many say yes—some researchers argue that gender diversity leads to more innovative thinking and signals to investors that a company is competently run. Others say no—conflicting research indicates that gender diversity can... View Details
- February 2019
- Article
Bounded Ethicality and Ethical Fading in Negotiations: Understanding Unintended Unethical Behavior
By: McKenzie Rees, Ann E. Tenbrunsel and Max Bazerman
The business scandals in the past several decades led to the rising importance of ethics as a topic central to management scholarship. Behavioral scientists in particular were attracted to the topic in far greater numbers, and the study of ethical decision-making... View Details
- Article
Why Am I Seeing This Ad? The Effect of Ad Transparency on Ad Effectiveness
By: Tami Kim, Kate Barasz and Leslie K. John
Given the increasingly specific ways marketers can target ads, many consumers and regulators are demanding ad transparency: disclosure of how consumers’ personal information was used to generate ads. We investigate how and why ad transparency impacts ad effectiveness.... View Details
- Article
Diversity Thresholds: How Social Norms, Visibility, and Scrutiny Relate to Group Composition
By: Edward H. Chang, Katherine L. Milkman, Dolly Chugh and Modupe Akinola
Across a field study and four experiments, we examine how social norms and scrutiny affect decisions about adding members of underrepresented populations (e.g., women, racial minorities) to groups. When groups are scrutinized, we theorize that decision makers strive to... View Details
- Article
Maimonides' Ladder: States of Mutual Knowledge and the Perception of Charitability
By: Julian De Freitas, Peter DiScioli, Kyle A. Thomas and Steven Pinker
Why do people esteem anonymous charitable giving? We connect normative theories of charitability
(captured in Maimonides’ Ladder of Charity) with evolutionary theories of partner choice to test predictions on how attributions of charitability are affected by states of... View Details
- Article
The Critical Role of Second-order Normative Beliefs in Predicting Energy Conservation
By: Jon M. Jachimowicz, Oliver P. Hauser, Julia D. O'Brien, Erin Sherman and Adam D. Galinsky
Sustaining large-scale public goods requires individuals to make environmentally friendly decisions today to benefit future generations. Recent research suggests that second-order normative beliefs are more powerful predictors of behaviour than first-order personal... View Details
- 2018
- Book
Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and Life
By: F. Gino
The world’s best chef.
An airline captain who brought his flight to safety in a daring water landing.
A magician known for his sensational escape acts.
A computer scientist who founded a world-renowned animation studio.
What do all of these... View Details
An airline captain who brought his flight to safety in a daring water landing.
A magician known for his sensational escape acts.
A computer scientist who founded a world-renowned animation studio.
What do all of these... View Details
- Article
If You're Going to Do Wrong, at Least Do It Right: Considering Two Moral Dilemmas at the Same Time Promotes Moral Consistency
By: Netta Barak-Corren, Chia-Jung Tsay, Fiery Cushman and Max Bazerman
We study how people reconcile conflicting moral intuitions by juxtaposing two versions of classic moral problems: the trolley problem and the footbridge problem. When viewed separately, most people favor action in the former and disapprove of action in the latter,... View Details
- Article
The Interplay Between Sharing Behavior and Beliefs About Others in Children During Dictator Games
By: Hernando Santamaría-García, María Luz González-Gadea, Rafael Di Tella, Agustín Ibáñez and Mariano Sigman
Previous studies in adults demonstrated that beliefs and sharing decisions in social scenarios are closely related. However, to date, little is known about the development of this relationship in children. By using a modified dictator game, we assessed sharing behavior... View Details
- January 29, 2018
- Article
How to Build Trust with Colleagues You Rarely See
By: Tsedal Neeley
Building trust is key to success for any organization. But that can be tricky when it comes to colleagues that you only interact with virtually. What does it take to build trust when you can’t meet in person? In this piece, the author suggests that professionals should... View Details
- Article
Normative Judgments and Individual Essence
By: Julian De Freitas, Kevin P. Tobia, George E. Newman and Joshua Knobe
A growing body of research has examined how people judge the persistence of identity over
time—that is, how they decide that a particular individual is the same entity from one time to the
next. While a great deal of progress has been made in understanding the types... View Details
Keywords: Concepts; Essentialism; Normative Factors; Persistence; True Self; Morality; Identity; Moral Sensibility; Perception
- December 2016
- Article
Selective Regulator Decoupling and Organizations' Strategic Responses
By: Jonas Heese, Ranjani Krishnan and Frank Moers
Organizations often respond to institutional pressures by symbolically adopting policies and procedures but decoupling them from actual practice. Literature has examined why organizations decouple from regulatory pressures. In this study, we argue that decoupling... View Details
- September 2016 (Revised April 2022)
- Case
Zhang Xin and the Emergence of Chinese Philanthropy
By: Geoffrey Jones and Amanda Yang
This case examines the recent emergence of Chinese business philanthropy through the case of the SOHO China Foundation established by the wife and husband real estate moguls Zhang Xin and Pan Shiyi. It begins by describing the early careers of Zhang and Pan, and how... View Details
- March–April 2016
- Article
Scrutiny, Norms, and Selective Disclosure: A Global Study of Greenwashing
By: Christopher Marquis, Michael W. Toffel and Yanhua Zhou
Under increased pressure to report environmental impacts, some firms selectively disclose relatively benign impacts, creating an impression of transparency while masking their true performance. We identify key company- and country-level factors that limit firms' use of... View Details