Publications

22 Jan 2018
Sharpening Your Skills

Why You Are Unhappy at Work

Blues A shockingly low 25 percent of employees feel connection to their company's mission. Bill George discusses fixes to rebuild purpose in their work. How Small Wins Unleash Creativity The most powerful tool managers have to motivate... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

January–February 2025
Article

Location-Specificity and Relocation Incentive Programs for Remote Workers

By: Thomaz Teodorovicz, Prithwiraj Choudhury and Evan Starr

The precipitous growth of remote work has given rise to a new phenomenon: the emergence of relocation incentive programs that localities use to compete for the physical presence of remote workers. Remote workers with high general human capital may create value for... View Details

Keywords: Remote Work; Motivation and Incentives; Geographic Location; Talent and Talent Management; Human Capital; Tulsa

Find at Harvard

15 Dec 2009
First Look

First Look: Dec. 15, 2009

focus events, and maintaining executive dedication to execute the initiative. The case provides a generalizable example for AHCs of how applying explicit management design can foster robust organizational change with relatively modest... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

05 Oct 2016
Research & Ideas

Why Don't More People Get Flu Shots at Work?

Economics; Brigitte C. Madrian, Aetna Professor of Public Policy and Corporate Management at the Harvard Kennedy School; and Gwendolyn I. Reynolds, with the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA. The team has completed... View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland; Health

30 Apr 2007
Research & Ideas

All Eyes on Slovakia’s Flat Tax

issues regarding tax harmonization within Europe and the integration process. Q: Could the flat tax only have been introduced in the context of other reforms that Slovakia was managing during its post-communism transition, such as View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace

July 1976 (Revised April 1983)
Case

Corning Glass Works: The Electronic Products Division (A)

By: Michael Beer

Describes a division of Corning Glass Works that finds itself with deep financial and organizational problems. Severe conflict and lack of coordination exist between functional groups. Employees do not have a sense of direction and morale is low. Provides sufficient... View Details

Keywords: Business Divisions; Change Management; Transformation; Employees; Working Conditions; Business or Company Management; Organizational Change and Adaptation

12 Jan 2016
First Look

January 12, 2016

Management Science The Relationship Between Workplace Stressors and Mortality and Health Costs in the United States By: Goh, Joel, Jeffrey Pfeffer, and Stefanos A. Zenios Abstract—Even though epidemiological evidence links specific... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

21 Sep 2009
Research & Ideas

Excessive Executive Pay: What’s the Solution?

too little say," said Schumer. "This legislation will give stockholders the ability to apply the emergency brakes the next time the company management appears to be heading off a cliff." Concurrent with Schumer's bill, the... View Details

Keywords: by Roger Thompson

23 Jun 2021
Research & Ideas

One More Way the Startup World Hampers Women Entrepreneurs

face in labor markets, they would want managers to use it more,” Koning says. When they examined product performance over time, they found that on a platform where nine-in-10 users are men, typical... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

22 Jun 2021
Research & Ideas

The COVID-19 Mutiny: When Teams Leave and Take Their Clients

or expanded during the pandemic. Not surprisingly, these are also the people most likely to work from home. More than 61 percent of those among the top-quarter of earners can do their jobs from home, compared with 9.2 percent in lowest quarter, according to the US... View Details

Keywords: by Robin Abrahams, Boris Groysberg, and Steven L. Manchel

2011
Working Paper

Do Powerful Politicians Cause Corporate Downsizing?

By: Lauren H. Cohen, Joshua D. Coval and Christopher J. Malloy

This paper employs a new empirical approach for identifying the impact of government spending on the private sector. Our key innovation is to use changes in congressional committee chairmanship as a source of exogenous variation in state-level federal expenditures. In... View Details

Keywords: Economic Growth; Investment; Spending; Government Administration; Employment; Managerial Roles

Read Now

2005
Working Paper

Silent Saboteurs: How Implicit Theories of Voice Inhibit the Upward Flow of Knowledge in Organizations

By: James R. Detert and Amy C. Edmondson

This article examines, in a series of three studies, how people working in organizational hierarchies wrestle with the challenge of upward voice. We first undertook in-depth exploratory research in a knowledge-intensive multinational corporation in which employee input... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Working Conditions; Knowledge Management; Attitudes; Organizational Culture

Read Now

29 Jul 2008
First Look

First Look: July 29, 2008

different versions of their applications for each social networking site. Facebook's managers had to decide how to respond to OpenSocial. Should they join the initiative or keep Facebook Platform proprietary and seek further... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

14 Feb 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research: February 14

Flows in the Global Economy Digital Labor Markets and Global Talent Flows By: Horton, John, William R. Kerr, and Christopher Stanton Abstract—We review the rapid development of digital labor markets that... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

October 2019
Case

Engaging the Nationwide Workforce

By: Ethan S. Bernstein, Jessica Gover and Sarah Mehta

Nationwide is “on your side,” but did employees feel that way? CAO Gale King and CEO Steve Rasmussen, starting in 2008, invested heavily in a human capital strategy centered around “engagement” at the Ohio-based Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company. Set in 2014, this... View Details

25 Apr 2018
Research & Ideas

We May Have Taken Too Much Credit for Easing Workplace Segregation

management ranks. Koning and Ferguson took a broader approach. They reviewed data collected by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission between 1971 and 2014, determining the racial makeup of every large private-sector workplace in the... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman

08 Dec 2003
Research & Ideas

Why Europe Lags in Pharmaceuticals and Biotech

Bastianelli, vice president of corporate development at ProSkelia Pharmaceuticals in France. Once companies are created, there is little incentive to improve, he said, and labor laws make it difficult to remove unproductive employees.... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Biotechnology; Health; Pharmaceutical; Technology

March 2025 (Revised June 2025)
Case

Designing the Future of Work: Atlassian's Distributed Work Practices

By: Ashley Whillans and Gabriel Rondón Ichikawa

In early 2020, the software company Atlassian made a bold commitment: employees could work from anywhere—forever. While many tech peers reversed course on remote work, Atlassian worked to optimize their fully distributed model across 13 countries. This case follows... View Details

Keywords: Transformation; Working Conditions; Management Practices and Processes; Product Development; Organizational Culture; Business Strategy; Employees; Technology Industry