Autonomy - Publications - Faculty & Research

Research Summary

Overview

Pushing decision authority downward and increasing employee autonomy have become watchwords for the modern organization. Leaders of contemporary organizations view efforts to replace “command and control” systems with less-hierarchical approaches to organizing as... View Details

Keywords: Formalization; Teams; Decentralization; Hierarchy; Organizational Design; Organizational Structure; Self-managing Organizations; Future Of Work; Flat Organization

Research Summary

Research Overview

Jillian has an interest in understanding the effect of high worker autonomy and uncertainty on operational metrics. Her research attempts to empirically explore the relationship between efficiency, resource utilization, and quality in hospital settings.... View Details

05 Feb 2024
Research & Ideas

The Middle Manager of the Future: More Coaching, Less Commanding

collaboration. The number of collaborative postings also increased as R&D budgets grew. Yet Zhang notes the potential for large differences depending on the industry. “Software companies may have a greater need for a collaborative type of manager to give workers a... View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand

15 Aug 2023
Research & Ideas

Why Giving to Others Makes Us Happy

give at all. “In some designs where people were told to do a task and were told that their efforts were going to be donated to a specific charity, that did not feel as good as being given a choice about where or whether to contribute,” Whillans says. That’s because... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

2024
Working Paper

Residential Battery Storage - Reshaping The Way We Do Electricity

By: Christian Kaps and Serguei Netessine

In this paper, we aim to understand when private households invest in behind-the-meter battery storage next to rooftop solar and how those batteries impact households, the electricity market, and emissions. We answer three main research questions: 1) When do customers... View Details

Keywords: Solar Power; Energy Storage; Technology And Innovation Management; Energy; Energy Policy; Renewable Energy; Technological Innovation; Innovation and Management; Energy Industry

Citation

SSRN

23 Jun 2023
HBS Case

This Company Lets Employees Take Charge—Even with Life and Death Decisions

higher levels of employee autonomy that “structured empowerment” promotes—presenting the best ideas to employees as choices rather than mandates, while holding them accountable for results. The COVID-19 pandemic forced Buurtzorg to... View Details

Keywords: by Annelena Lobb; Health

26 Apr 2022
Book

What Does Your Business Stand For? Why Building Trust Starts with Purpose

Ranjay Gulati Chapter 7: The Purpose-Autonomy-Trust Nexus On one level, the connection between trust and autonomy seems fairly obvious, but analyzing it I found some interesting connections not only between trust and autonomy, but between... View Details

Keywords: by Ranjay Gulati

Research Summary

Designing Productive Zones of Privacy

By: Ethan S. Bernstein

A common theme that integrates my research and course development is how increasingly transparent workplaces can improve productivity and performance by putting up certain boundaries to observation. While the research above empirically and theoretically explores the... View Details

Keywords: Transparency; Privacy; Field Experiments; Design; Organizational Design; Performance

2020
Working Paper

Cutting the Gordian Knot of Employee Health Care Benefits and Costs: A Corporate Model Built on Employee Choice

By: Regina E. Herzlinger and Barak D. Richman

The U.S. employer-based health insurance tax exclusion created a system of employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) with limited insurance choices and transparency that may lock employed households into health plans that are costlier or different from those they prefer to... View Details

Keywords: After-tax Income; Consumer-driven Health Care; Health Care Costs; Health Insurance; Income Inequality; Tax Policy; Health Care and Treatment; Cost; Insurance; Employees; Income; Taxation; Policy; United States

Citation

SSRN

Read Now

04 May 2021
Book

Best Buy: How Human Connection Saved a Failing Retailer

company, giving employees a greater sense of joy and autonomy in their work, and attracting customers with a new service-oriented approach. Along the way, the company’s share price grew from a low of $11 in 2012 to $110 by 2020. In his... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Retail

04 Jan 2017
What Do You Think?

How Much Bureaucracy is a Good Thing in Government and Business?

bureaucracies do have decision-making responsibilities. Dean Dastvar put it this way: “Bureaucracy, in some form, is not necessarily an evil but rather a tool which can be refined generation after generation There is a need for reform so that decision makers within... View Details

Keywords: by James L. Heskett

16 Nov 2021
HBS Case

How a Company Made Employees So Miserable, They Killed Themselves

low-skilled commercial roles. For some, this meant “going from a position of considerable autonomy and professional status to a situation in which they had to read a script from a headset, sell products over the phone, and ask permission... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

10 May 2012
Working Paper Summaries

The Flattened Firm—Not as Advertised

Keywords: by Julie Wulf

12 Apr 2017
Research & Ideas

Why Productivity Suffers When Employees Are Allowed to Schedule Their Own Tasks

thanks to technological advances like internet connectivity, mobile devices, and software. Autonomy is a much-touted benefit at many organizations, and it’s nice to believe that we each know the best path to our own optimal productivity.... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Health

25 Jun 2024
Research & Ideas

How Transparency Sped Innovation in a $13 Billion Wireless Sector

and partners about their technologies can increase innovation and speed the introduction of new products. Specifically, the study finds evidence that openness—in this case, via the use of open-source software drivers—improves supplier View Details

Keywords: by Jay Fitzgerald; Technology

07 Apr 2021
Research & Ideas

How Teams Work: Lessons from the Pandemic

allow for more personal autonomy over the work.” Process interactions: Prioritizing quality over quantity In terms of agenda-setting, Perlow, Whillans, and Turek found that balancing the quantity and quality of process interactions was... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

18 Jan 2022
Research & Ideas

How Eliminating Non-Competes Could Reshape Tech

for those employees to be entrepreneurial without having to leave. As is obvious in the Zoom example, these employees are exactly the ones that established employers should be fighting hardest to retain. Imagine what it would have meant for Cisco if Yuan had the View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz; Technology

19 Apr 2010
Research & Ideas

The History of Beauty

autonomy beauty companies have to shape ideals. Unilever's current Dove marketing campaign, which uses senior women as models to make the point that one can be beautiful beyond one's 30s, shows that a large company has the power to... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Beauty & Cosmetics

15 Aug 2022
Book

University of the Future: Finding the Next World Leaders in Higher Ed

Americans, of the virtues of limited government, and as a result it has the smallest and least intrusive central administration of any major American university and is undistinguished in central planning. Its faculties and schools defend their View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Education

31 Aug 2021
Book

Feeling Powerless at Work? Time to Agitate, Innovate, and Orchestrate

pernicious effects that power has." Sharing some of their power with their employees, for example by giving them more autonomy or allowing them to contribute to the decision-making process, can actually lead to better results: higher... View Details

Keywords: by Jay Fitzgerald

Publications