Publications

April 2024 (Revised November 2024)
Case

Moderna: Pioneering a People Platform to Accelerate Science Innovation

By: Tatiana Sandino, Emil Dy and Samuel Grad

Moderna was founded in 2010 to explore how messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) could be used to create breakthrough medicines by encoding instructions for the body to create antibodies. When Stéphane Bancel (HBS 2000) took over in 2011, he bet on the potential of this... View Details

Keywords: Disruptive Innovation; Talent and Talent Management; Selection and Staffing; AI and Machine Learning; Digital Strategy; Innovation and Management; Leadership Development; Management Practices and Processes; Management Systems; Organizational Culture; Performance Evaluation; Alignment; Employee Relationship Management; Science-Based Business; Expansion; Pharmaceutical Industry; Biotechnology Industry; United States

February 2024
Supplement

Dena Almansoori at e&: Fostering Culture Change at a UAE Telco Transforming to a Global Techco

By: Emily Truelove, Michelle Zhang and Alpana Thapar

Dena Almansoori, the first female and one of the youngest members of the United Arab Emirates-based e&’s leadership team, joined in 2020 just before e& began a strategic transition from being a regional telecommunications company to becoming a global technology... View Details

Keywords: Technology; Telecommunications; Employee Mobility; Leading Change; Human Resources; Organizational Culture; Transformation; Talent and Talent Management; Change Management; Employee Relationship Management; Telecommunications Industry; Technology Industry; Middle East; United Arab Emirates

February 2024
Case

Chime Solutions

By: Shai Bernstein, William R. Kerr, Christopher Stanton, Raymond Kluender and Mel Martin

Just two years after launching its 10k by 2020 initiative to hire 10,000 employees by 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced Chief Executive Officer Mark Wilson to send nearly all of his staff at Chime Solutions (Chime) to work from home. Chime was a customer contact firm... View Details

Keywords: Working Capital; Service Operations; Recruitment; Performance; Change Management; Retention; Financial Institutions; Employee Relationship Management; Talent and Talent Management; Growth Management; Mission and Purpose; Communications Industry; Service Industry; United States

January 2024 (Revised June 2024)
Case

School of Rock: Tuning into Structured Empowerment (A)

By: Tatiana Sandino, Jeffrey Rayport, Samuel Grad and Stacy Straaberg

In summer 2021, School of Rock was a youth-oriented music education company with 291 franchise- and company-owned schools globally. Before CEO Rob Price’s hire in 2017, School of Rock’s nonconformist rock ‘n’ roll culture led to variability in teaching styles,... View Details

2024
Working Paper

Employer-Based Short-Term Savings Accounts

By: Sarah Holmes Berk, John Beshears, Jay Garg, James J. Choi and David Laibson

We study the introduction of a choice architecture design intended to increase short-term savings among employees at five U.K. firms. Employees were offered the opportunity to opt into a payroll deduction program that auto-deposits funds from each paycheck into a... View Details

Keywords: Behavior; Personal Finance; Investment Funds; Employees; Saving; United Kingdom

2024
White Paper

Healthy Outcomes: How Employers' Support for Employees with Caregiving Responsibilities Can Benefit the Organization

By: Joseph B. Fuller

Keywords: Work-Life Balance; Performance Productivity; Employees; Human Capital

January–February 2024
Article

The Challenge of Maintaining Passion for Work over Time: A Daily Perspective on Passion and Emotional Exhaustion

By: Joy Bredehorst, Kai Krautter, Jirs Meuris and Jon M. Jachimowicz

Passion for work is highly coveted, but many employees report struggling to maintain their passion over time. In the current research, we explain the challenge of pursuing passion by conceptualizing passion as an attribute with temporal variation. Viewed through a... View Details

Keywords: Passion; Work-Life Balance; Employees; Emotions

2024
Working Paper

The Impact of Culture Consistency on Subunit Outcomes

By: Jasmijn Bol, Robert Grasser, Serena Loftus and Tatiana Sandino

We examine the association between subunit culture consistency—defined as the congruence between the organizational values espoused by top management and those perceived and practiced by subunit employees—and subunit outcomes. Using data from 235 subunits of a... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Culture; Employees; Creativity; Satisfaction

December 2023
Teaching Note

Buurtzorg

By: Ethan Bernstein and Tatiana Sandino

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 122-101. As co-founders of home nursing company Buurtzorg, Jos de Blok and Gonnie Kronenberg prized both self-management and organizational learning. Buurtzorg’s 10,000 nurses across 950 neighborhood nursing teams in the Netherlands were... View Details

Keywords: Health Care and Treatment; Employee Relationship Management; Knowledge Dissemination; Knowledge Management; Management Practices and Processes; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Groups and Teams; Learning; Health Industry; Netherlands

2023
Working Paper

Rapport in Organizations: Evidence from Fast Food

By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Parker Howell, Anant Nyshadham and Jorge Tamayo

Common identity often provides a foundation for workplace rapport. Though gender is perhaps the most frequently studied dimension of identity among workers, little is known about how gender match between managers and their workers might affect team performance. Using... View Details

Keywords: Management; Relationships; Gender; Labor and Management Relations; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Employees; Food and Beverage Industry; Colombia

December 2023 (Revised July 2024)
Case

Boortmalt: The Master Maltster

By: Forest Reinhardt, Jose B Alvarez, Damien McLoughlin, Lena Duchene and Emer Moloney

By May 2023, Boortmalt was the world’s leading producer of malt, with a production capacity of 3 million tonnes, 15% of global market share, and 27 malting plants across five continents. It had recently acquired a major competitor and had sustained an EBITDA growth of... View Details

December 4, 2023
Article

Stop Assuming Introverts Aren't Passionate About Work

By: Kai Krautter, Anabel Büchner and Jon M. Jachimowicz

Society often assumes that the only way to be passionate is to act extroverted, but that is simply not true. In their new research, the authors found that regardless of their actual level of passion, extroverted employees are perceived as more passionate than... View Details

Keywords: Passion; Personality; Extraversion; Scale Development; Personal Characteristics; Perception; Employees; Prejudice and Bias

December 2023
Article

Discerning Saints: Moralization of Intrinsic Motivation and Selective Prosociality at Work

By: Mijeong Kwon, Julia Lee Cunningham and Jon M. Jachimowicz

Intrinsic motivation has received widespread attention as a predictor of positive work outcomes, including employees’ prosocial behavior. In the current research, we offer a more nuanced view by proposing that intrinsic motivation does not uniformly increase prosocial... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Behavior; Moral Sensibility; Employees

December 2023
Article

Recover, Explore, Practice: The Transformative Potential of Sabbaticals

By: Kira Schabram, Matt Bloom and DJ DiDonna

Sabbaticals have seen an exponential growth in adoption over the last two decades and are ascribed extensive benefits by employers and employees alike. Little is known, however, about how individuals spend their time or how their experiences impact them after they... View Details

Keywords: Sabbatical; Personal Development and Career; Employees

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2023
Working Paper

The Impact of Unionization on Consumer Perceptions of Service Quality: Evidence from Starbucks

By: Isamar Troncoso, Minkyung Kim, Ishita Chakraborty and SooHyun Kim

The US has seen a rise in union movements, but their effects on service industry marketing outcomes like customer satisfaction and perceptions of service quality remain understudied. In this paper, we empirically study the impact on customer satisfaction and... View Details

Keywords: Labor Unions; Customer Satisfaction; Perception; Public Opinion; Employees; Food and Beverage Industry

SSRN

November 2023
Article

Brokerage House Initial Public Offerings and Analyst Forecast Quality

By: Mark Bradshaw, Michael Drake, Joseph Pacelli and Brady Twedt

We examine how brokerage firm initial public offerings (IPOs) influence the research quality of sell-side analysts employed by the brokerage. Our main results focus on earnings forecast bias and absolute forecast errors as proxies for research quality. Using a... View Details

Keywords: IPOs; Research Analysts; ＂Brokerage Industry; Initial Public Offering; Employees; Behavior; Outcome or Result

October 26, 2023
Article

How to Connect Employees to Your Company’s Purpose

By: Hubert Joly

We know making a noble corporate purpose — that is, one aimed at doing something good in the world — come to life is both important and hard. Emerging practices from leading companies show that the journey is not about top-down messaging. If anything, it’s about... View Details

Keywords: Mission and Purpose; Employee Relationship Management

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October 2023
Case

Making Progress at Progress Software (A)

By: Katherine Coffman, Hannah Riley Bowles and Alexis Lefort

In this case, the Human Capital team at Progress Software has identified that some employees have a hard time understanding how to advance within Progress. This realization leads the team to develop several major people-process innovations: the introduction of... View Details

Keywords: Leading Change; Organizational Culture; Performance Evaluation; Prejudice and Bias; Personal Development and Career; Human Capital; Employee Relationship Management; Technology Industry; Bulgaria

October 2023 (Revised January 2024)
Case

Ball: EVA Driving the World's Leading Can Manufacturer (A)

By: Jonas Heese and Susan Pinckney

The case describes Ball’s multi decade history of using Economic Value Added to drive decision making and workforce compensation. In 2016, the company acquired Rexam PLC and became the world’s leading metal beverage container company. Consumer demand for varied... View Details