Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(687)
- Faculty Publications (96)
- Article
The Implications of Working Without an Office
By: Ethan Bernstein, Hayley Blunden, Andrew Brodsky, Wonbin Sohn and Ben Waber
In early 2020, the world began what is undoubtedly the largest work-from-home experiment in history. Now, as countries reopen but COVID-19 remains a major threat, organizations are wrestling with whether and how to have workers return to their offices. Business leaders... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
No Line Left Behind: Assortative Matching Inside the Firm
By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Vittorio Bassi, Anant Nyshadham and Jorge Tamayo
How do firms pair workers with managers, and which constraints affect the allocation of labor within the firm? We characterize the sorting pattern of managers to workers in a large readymade garment manufacturer in India and then explore potential drivers of the... View Details
- February 2020
- Technical Note
Talent Management and the Future of Work
By: William R. Kerr and Gorick Ng
The nature of work is changing—and it is changing rapidly. Few days go by without industry giants such as Amazon and AT&T announcing plans to invest billions of dollars towards retraining nearly half of their respective workforces for jobs of the future. What changes... View Details
Keywords: Human Resource Management; Human Capital Development; Human Resource Practices; Talent; Talent Acquisition; Talent Development; Talent Development And Retention; Talent Management; Talent Retention; Labor Flows; Labor Management; Labor Market; Strategy Development; Strategy Management; Strategy Execution; Strategy And Execution; Strategic Change; Transformations; Organization; Organization Alignment; Organization Design; Organizational Adaptation; Organizational Effectiveness; Management Challenges; Management Of Business And Political Risk; Change Leadership; Future Of Work; Future; Skills Gap; Skills Development; Skills; Offshoring And Outsourcing; Investment; Capital Allocation; Work; Work Culture; Work Force Management; Work/life Balance; Work/family Balance; Work-family Boundary Management; Workers; Worker Productivity; Worker Performance; Work Engagement; Work Environment; Work Environments; Productivity; Organization Culture; Soft Skills; Technology Management; Technological Change; Technological Change: Choices And Consequences; Technology Diffusion; Disruptive Technology; Global Business; Global; Workplace; Workplace Context; Workplace Culture; Workplace Wellness; Collaboration; Competencies; Productivity Gains; Digital; Digital Transition; Competitive Dynamics; Competitiveness; Competitive Strategy; Data Analytics; Data; Data Management; Data Strategy; Data Protection; Aging Society; Diversity; Diversity Management; Millennials; Communication Complexity; Communication Technologies; International Business; Work Sharing; Global Competitiveness; Global Corporate Cultures; Intellectual Property; Intellectual Property Management; Intellectual Property Protection; Intellectual Capital And Property Issues; Globalization Of Supply Chain; Inequality; Recruiting; Hiring; Hiring Of Employees; Training; Job Cuts And Outsourcing; Job Performance; Job Search; Job Design; Job Satisfaction; Jobs; Employee Engagement; Employee Attitude; Employee Benefits; Employee Compensation; Employee Fairness; Employee Relationship Management; Employee Retention; Employee Selection; Employee Motivation; Employee Feedback; Employee Coordination; Employee Performance Management; Employee Socialization; Process Improvement; Application Performance Management; Stigma; Institutional Change; Candidates; Digital Enterprise; Cultural Adaptation; Cultural Change; Cultural Diversity; Cultural Context; Cultural Strategies; Cultural Psychology; Cultural Reform; Performance; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Management; Performance Evaluation; Performance Appraisal; Performance Feedback; Performance Measurement; Performance Metrics; Performance Measures; Performance Efficiency; Efficiency; Performance Analysis; Performance Appraisals; Performance Improvement; Automation; Artificial Intelligence; Technology Companies; Managerial Processes; Skilled Migration; Assessment; Human Resources; Management; Human Capital; Talent and Talent Management; Retention; Demographics; Labor; Strategy; Change; Change Management; Transformation; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Working Conditions; Information Technology; Technology Adoption; Disruption; Economy; Competition; Globalization; AI and Machine Learning; Digital Transformation
- October 14, 2019
- Article
The Truth About Open Offices: There Are Reasons Why They Don't Produce the Desired Interactions
By: Ethan Bernstein and Ben Waber
It’s never been easier for workers to collaborate—or so it seems. Open, flexible, activity-based spaces are displacing cubicles, making people more visible. Messaging is displacing phone calls, making people more accessible. Enterprise social media such as Slack and... View Details
- September 2019 (Revised December 2022)
- Case
Cooking Down a Storm: Changing Culture at Pasta Serafina (A)
Plant management at Pasta Serafina, a pasta producer in the south of Italy, is struggling to contain employee absenteeism. While the misbehavior is concentrated in a minority of the workers, its effects impact not only the plant’s performance, but also the climate and... View Details
- April 2019 (Revised March 2020)
- Case
Handy: The Future of Work? (A)
By: Nien-hê Hsieh and Kieron Stopforth
Witnessing numerous lawsuits alleging that online platform companies misclassified workers as contractors when they were actually employees, Handy’s founders faced a series of decisions. Handy was an online platform business that enabled customers to book appointments... View Details
- April 2019
- Article
Incentives for Public Goods Inside Organizations: Field Experimental Evidence
By: Andrea Blasco, Olivia S. Jung, Karim R. Lakhani and Michael Menietti
Understanding why employees go the extra mile at work is a key problem for many organizations. We conduct a field experiment at a medical organization to study motivations for employees to submit project proposals for organizational improvement. In total, we analyze... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Biometric Monitoring, Service Delivery and Misreporting: Evidence from Healthcare in India
By: Thomas Bossuroy, Clara Delavallade and Vincent Pons
Developing countries increasingly use biometric identification technology in hopes of improving the reliability of administrative information and delivering social services more efficiently. This paper exploits the random placement of biometric tracking devices in... View Details
- January–February 2019
- Article
Corporate Purpose and Financial Performance
By: Claudine Gartenberg, Andrea Prat and George Serafeim
We construct a measure of corporate purpose within a sample of U.S. companies based on approximately 500,000 survey responses of worker perceptions about their employers. We find that this measure of purpose is not related to financial performance. However, high... View Details
- Article
The Business Case for Curiosity
By: Francesca Gino
Although leaders might say they value inquisitive minds, in reality most stifle curiosity, fearing it will increase risk and inefficiency. Harvard Business School’s Francesca Gino elaborates on the benefits of and common barriers to curiosity in the workplace and... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Social Attachment to Place and Psychic Costs of Geographic Mobility: How Distance from Hometown and Vacation Flexibility Affect Job Performance
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Ohchan Kwon
Using a natural experiment and field interviews, this paper studies how social attachment to place imposes psychic costs on workers who experience geographic mobility. This is especially salient when workers are assigned to locations far from their hometown, which may... View Details
- May 2018
- Article
The Downside of Downtime: The Prevalence and Work Pacing Consequences of Idle Time at Work
By: Andrew Brodsky and Teresa M. Amabile
Although both media commentary and academic research have focused much attention on the dilemma of employees being too busy, this paper presents evidence of the opposite phenomenon, in which employees do not have enough work to fill their time and are left with hours... View Details
- February 2018 (Revised May 2019)
- Case
CEWD: Closing the Skills Gap
By: William Kerr, Michael Norris and Manjari Raman
In 2018, Ann Randazzo, executive director of the Center for Energy Workforce Development (CEWD) is assessing the organization’s performance since its 2006 founding. Founded to address an imminent retirement bubble of middle skills workers in the utilities industry,... View Details
- Article
Why Every Organization Needs an Augmented Reality Strategy
By: Michael E. Porter and James E. Heppelmann
While the physical world is three-dimensional, most data is trapped on two-dimensional pages and screens. This gulf between the real and digital worlds prevents us from fully exploiting the volumes of information now available to us. Augmented reality (AR), a set of... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
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 increase their service time, up to a point, to complete work more... View Details
- Article
Reclaim Your Commute: Getting To and From Work Doesn't Have to be Soul Crushing
By: Francesca Gino, Bradley Staats, Jon M. Jachimowicz, Julia J. Lee and Jochen I. Menges
Every day, millions of people around the world face long commutes to work. In the United States alone, approximately 25 million workers spend more than 90 minutes each day getting to and from their jobs. And yet few people enjoy their commutes. This distaste for... View Details
- February 2017 (Revised May 2018)
- Case
The Flint, Michigan Sit-Down Strike
By: Tom Nicholas, Christopher T. Stanton and Matthew Preble
For roughly six weeks between late December 1936 and February 1937, a major strike at several critical General Motors (GM) plants in Flint, Michigan, essentially halted the corporation’s U.S. production and resulted in significant gains for the nascent United... View Details
Keywords: Industrial Unionism; Craft Unionism; Welfare Capitalism; General Motors; Labor; Labor Unions; Labor and Management Relations; Wages; Working Conditions; Government Legislation; Business History; Business and Government Relations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Business and Community Relations; Auto Industry; Manufacturing Industry; Mining Industry; Steel Industry; United States; Michigan
- 2016
- Working Paper
Operations in the On-Demand Economy: Staffing Services with Self-Scheduling Capacity
By: Itai Gurvich, Martin Lariviere and Antonio Moreno
Motivated by recent innovations in service delivery such as ride-sharing services and work-from-home call centers, we study capacity management when workers self-schedule. Our service provider chooses capacity to maximize its profit (revenue from served customers minus... View Details
- January 2016
- Article
Making Do with Less: Working Harder During Recessions
By: Edward P. Lazear, Kathryn L. Shaw and Christopher Stanton
Why did productivity rise during recent recessions? One possibility is that average worker quality increased. A second is that each incumbent worker produced more. The second effect is termed "making do with less." Using data from 2006 to 2010 on individual worker... View Details
- December 2015
- Background Note
Incentive Systems
By: Brian J. Hall
This note serves as a supplement to any course on incentive design within organizations. The note focuses on the principal difficulties in designing incentive systems, including the tradeoff between objective and subjective performance metrics, how to design incentive... View Details