Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(322)
- Faculty Publications (102)
- April 2011
- Case
Kay Sunderland: Making the Grade at Attain Learning
By: Linda A. Hill and Heather Beckham
Kay Sunderland is an account director at Attain Learning Inc., a business training solutions company. In January 2011, one of Attain's most important clients, Juan Nunez of Gramen Equipment Company, contacts Sunderland with a request: Nunez would like Attain content... View Details
Keywords: Communication; Interpersonal Relations; Personal Strategy ＆ Style; Creativity; Conflict; Interdepartmental Relations; Talent Management; Management Style; Interpersonal Communication; Talent and Talent Management; Relationships; Conflict and Resolution; Communication Strategy; Power and Influence; Service Industry
- April 2011 (Revised July 2014)
- Case
Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd.: Driving Change Through Internal Communication
By: Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind
Hindustan Petroleum (HPCL), confronted in 2003 with an urgent need to change how it operated externally, adopted a highly innovative approach to communicating internally. This case, set in 2010, presents an overview of the new, more interactive model of employee... View Details
- April 2011 (Revised May 2011)
- Case
EMC2: Delivering Customer Centricity
By: Thomas Steenburgh and Jill Avery
This case introduces the concept of customer centricity and traces its development at EMC, the world's leading data storage hardware and information management software company. EMC's customers had historically relied on EMC salespeople to guide them through the... View Details
- 2011
- Working Paper
Risky Trust: How Multi-entity Teams Develop Trust in a High Risk Endeavor
By: Faaiza Rashid and Amy C. Edmondson
This paper explicates the challenge of risky trust, which we define as trust that exists between parties vulnerable to high economic, legal, or reputational risks at individual or organizational levels. Drawing from analyses of data collected in a grounded case study... View Details
- March 2010
- Article
Interpersonal Authority in a Theory of the Firm
This paper develops a theory of the firm in which a firm's centralized asset ownership and low-powered incentives give the manager, as an equilibrium outcome, interpersonal authority over employees (in a world with open disagreement). The paper thus provides... View Details
- October 2009
- Case
Medisys Corp.: The IntensCare Product Development Team
By: Anne Donnellon and Joshua D. Margolis
Key topics include designing teams, managing teams, managing conflict, group dynamics, project management, product development, interdepartmental relations, and organizational change. MediSys, a U.S.-based medical equipment maker, has been developing IntensCare, a new... View Details
Keywords: Project Management; Interdepartmental Relations; Organizational Change; Leadership; Conflict Management; Interpersonal Communication; Groups and Teams; Product Design; Product Development; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Health Care and Treatment; Power and Influence; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry; United States
- September 2009
- Module Note
Leading Teams Note
This note, which describes the architecture and processes that characterize effective teams, begins by detailing the steps involved in designing a team, from diagnosing the complexity, interdependence, and objectives of the task to harnessing the key resources teams... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Fluid Tasks and Fluid Teams: The Impact of Diversity in Experience and Team Familiarity on Team Performance
By: Robert S. Huckman and Bradley R. Staats
In this paper, we consider how the structures of tasks and teams interact to affect team performance. We study the effects of diversity in experience on a team's ability to respond to task changes, by separately examining interpersonal team diversity (i.e., differences... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Walking Through Jelly: Language Proficiency, Emotions, and Disrupted Collaboration in Global Work
By: Tsedal Beyene, Pamela J. Hinds and Catherine Durnell Cramton
In an ethnographic study comprised of interviews and concurrent observations of 145 globally distributed members of nine project teams of an organization, we found that uneven proficiency in English, the lingua franca, disrupted collaboration for both native and... View Details
- May 2009 (Revised August 2010)
- Case
The Jenner Situation
By: Richard G. Hamermesh, Andy Whittemore and Eliot Sherman
Dr. Bill Lemont is the new chief medical officer of a large academic medical center. During his first week on the job he has become aware of the abusive behavior and temper outbursts of a prominent orthopedic surgeon. How Dr. Lemont handles the situation will be... View Details
- May 2009
- Article
Authority versus Persuasion
This paper studies a manager's trade-off between using persuasion and using interpersonal authority to get an employee to 'do the right thing' from the manager's perspective (when the manager and employee disagree on the right course of action). It... View Details
- 2009
- Chapter
Collaboration Across Knowledge Boundaries within Diverse Teams: Reciprocal Expertise Affirmation as an Enabling Condition
By: Amy C. Edmondson, Kate Roloff and Lucy H. MacPhail
We review research on expertise diversity, psychological safety, team collaboration, and role identity to propose a model in which reciprocal affirmations of expertise identity among team members—a feature of the team environment that we conceptualize as a dimension of... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Authority versus Persuasion
This paper studies a principal's trade-off between using persuasion versus using interpersonal authority to get the agent to "do the right thing"; from the principal's perspective (when the principal and agent openly disagree on the right course of action). It shows... View Details
- 2008
- Working Paper
Cultural Notes on Chinese Negotiating Behavior
By: James K. Sebenius and Cheng (Jason) Qian
Western businesses negotiating with Chinese firms face many challenges, from initiating and smoothing communication to establishing long-lasting relationships and mutual trust, and from bargaining and drafting agreements to securing their implementation. Chinese... View Details
- 2008
- Chapter
Overcoming Barriers to Collaboration: Psychological Safety and Learning in Diverse Teams
By: A. Edmondson and Kate Roloff
We review research on psychological safety and team learning to identify core ideas and findings in these closely related literatures and to propose a model in which a negative relationship between team member diversity and team collaboration is moderated by... View Details
- 2008
- Chapter
When Learning and Performance Are at Odds: Confronting the Tension
By: Sara Jean Singer and A. C. Edmondson
This chapter explores complexities of the relationship between learning and performance. We start with the general proposition that learning promotes performance and then describe several challenges for researchers and managers who wish to study or promote learning in... View Details
- July – August 2008
- Article
Making Diverse Teams Click
High interpersonal congruence-meaning alignment between team members' self-assessments and their appraisals of one another-improves the performance of diverse teams. And 360-degree feedback can help. View Details
- 2008
- Book
Managing Up
By: Linda A. Hill
Managing up is not political game playing. Rather, it's a conscious approach to working with your supervisor toward goals that are important to both of you. Through managing up, you build a productive working relationship with your boss and create a way to use the... View Details
- January 2008 (Revised May 2008)
- Case
Comcast New England: A Journey of Organizational Transformation
By: Michael Beer and Anita Arun
This case describes how Kevin Casey, Comcast's New England Region general manager, transformed a low commitment and performance organization. When he took charge of this Comcast region he inherited an organization that was bureaucratic, had low customer satisfaction,... View Details
- September 2007 (Revised December 2008)
- Case
Michael Fernandes at Nicholas Piramal
By: Michel Anteby and Nitin Nohria
Michael Fernandes, the Director of Custom Manufacturing Operations at the pharmaceutical company Nicholas Piramal India Limited (NPIL), schedules a meeting with three of his reports, whose interpersonal conflicts with one another are causing his business development... View Details