Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(1,283)
- Faculty Publications (392)
Morale
→
- March 2020 (Revised May 2021)
- Case
Employee Activism
By: Ethan Rouen and Akari Furukawa
Liz O’Sullivan, an employee at a fast-growing technology company called Clarifi, had a moral dilemma: She disagreed with Clarifi’s decision to sell its image-recognition technology to the U.S. Department of Defense for possible use in weaponized drones. This case... View Details
- March 2020 (Revised August 2020)
- Case
Culture at Google
By: Nien-hê Hsieh, Amy Klopfenstein and Sarah Mehta
Beginning in 2017, technology (tech) company Google faced a series of employee-relations issues that threatened its unique culture of innovation and open communication. Issues included protests surrounding Google’s contracts with the U.S. government, restrictions of... View Details
Keywords: Human Resources; Employee Relationship Management; Recruitment; Retention; Resignation and Termination; Labor; Working Conditions; Employment; Labor Unions; Wages; Law; Lawsuits and Litigation; Rights; Ethics; Values and Beliefs; Fairness; Organizations; Organizational Culture; Mission and Purpose; Social Psychology; Attitudes; Behavior; Conflict Management; Trust; Motivation and Incentives; Prejudice and Bias; Power and Influence; Information Technology; Internet and the Web; Information Infrastructure; Society; Social Issues; Culture; Civil Society or Community; Demographics; Diversity; Ethnicity; Gender; Race; Technology Industry; North and Central America; United States; California
- January–March 2020
- Article
Inaction and Decision Making in Moral Conflicts
By: Netta Barak-Corren and Max Bazerman
People regularly face conflicts in which obeying one moral requirement means transgressing another. Moral conflicts require difficult decisions: a person believes she should take both actions, but doing both is impossible. In this paper, we examine a common form of... View Details
- February 2020
- Article
Being 'Good' or 'Good Enough': Prosocial Risk and the Structure of Moral Self-regard
By: Julian Zlatev, Daniella M. Kupor, Kristin Laurin and Dale T. Miller
The motivation to feel moral powerfully guides people’s prosocial behavior. We propose that people’s efforts to preserve their moral self-regard conform to a moral threshold model. This model predicts that people are primarily concerned with whether their... View Details
- Article
Signaling When Nobody Is Watching: A Reputation Heuristics Account of Outrage and Punishment in One-shot Anonymous Interactions
By: Jillian J. Jordan and David G. Rand
Moralistic punishment can confer reputation benefits by signaling trustworthiness to observers. However, why do people punish even when nobody is watching? We argue that people often rely on the heuristic that reputation is typically at stake, such that reputation... View Details
Keywords: Signaling; Morality; Trustworthiness; Anger; Third-party Punishment; Moral Sensibility; Behavior; Trust; Reputation
- November 26, 2019
- Article
Veil-of-Ignorance Reasoning Favors the Greater Good
By: Karen Huang, Joshua D. Greene and Max Bazerman
The “veil of ignorance” is a moral reasoning device designed to promote impartial decision-making by denying decision-makers access to potentially biasing information about who will benefit most or least from the available options. Veil-of-ignorance reasoning was... 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
- September 2019 (Revised February 2022)
- Case
Glenn Defense Marine Asia (A)
By: Susanna Gallani, Anja Anliker, Luke Hodges and Amram Migdal
This case describes the growth of Glenn Defense Marine Asia (GDMA) under the leadership of Leonard Glenn Francis. GDMA provided ship husbanding and logistical support services to the United States Navy when Navy ships visited various ports in Southeast Asia. The case... View Details
Keywords: Business Ventures; Business Growth and Maturation; Crime and Corruption; Ethics; Fairness; Moral Sensibility; Values and Beliefs; Governance; Corporate Accountability; Governance Controls; Government and Politics; Law; Contracts; Lawfulness; Operations; Shipping Industry; Service Industry; Asia; Southeast Asia; Malaysia; Singapore
- September 2019 (Revised February 2022)
- Supplement
Glenn Defense Marine Asia (B)
By: Susanna Gallani, Anja Anliker, Luke Hodges and Amram Migdal
This case describes the growth of Glenn Defense Marine Asia (GDMA) under the leadership of Leonard Glenn Francis. GDMA provided ship husbanding and logistical support services to the United States Navy when Navy ships visited various ports in Southeast Asia. The case... View Details
Keywords: Business Ventures; Business Growth and Maturation; Crime and Corruption; Ethics; Fairness; Moral Sensibility; Values and Beliefs; Governance; Corporate Accountability; Governance Controls; Government and Politics; Law; Contracts; Lawfulness; Operations; Shipping Industry; Service Industry; Asia; Southeast Asia; Malaysia; Singapore
- Article
How to (Inadvertently) Sabotage Your Organization
By: Stefan Thomke
Some of the biggest threats to organizational performance can and do come from within. In an age when companies are told to be agile, to learn from experiments, and to be entrepreneurial, we are still vulnerable to actions — deliberate or unintentional — that stem from... View Details
- July 9, 2019
- Article
Common Knowledge, Coordination, and Strategic Mentalizing in Human Social Life
By: Julian De Freitas, Kyle A. Thomas, Peter DiScioli and Steven Pinker
People often coordinate for mutual gain, such as keeping to opposite sides of a stairway, dubbing an object or place with a name, or assembling en masse to protest a regime. Because successful coordination requires complementary choices, these opportunities raise the... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Veil-of-Ignorance Reasoning Favors the Greater Good
By: Karen Huang, Joshua D. Greene and Max Bazerman
The “veil of ignorance” is a moral reasoning device designed to promote impartial decision-making by denying decision-makers access to potentially biasing information about who will benefit most or least from the available options. Veil-of-ignorance reasoning was... View Details
- June 2019 (Revised February 2020)
- Case
Eric Hawkins Leading Agile Teams @ Digitally-Born AppFolio (A)
By: Tsedal Neeley, Paul Leonardi and Michael Norris
Eric Hawkins, director of engineering at AppFolio—a digital technology firm that offered cloud-based business software to small and medium sized companies—was shocked by an unusual request from his senior leadership team. Could Hawkins and one of his agile teams build... View Details
- June 2019
- Case
Athena Bancorp
By: Leonard A. Schlesinger and Sarah Abbott
Athena Bancorp was founded in 2016 by Beth Daniels, a banking professional with 15 years of experience in the industry. Daniels took advantage of what she perceived as a gap in the market caused by recent industry consolidation, a decreasing industry focus on branch... View Details
- 2010
- Article
I May Not Agree With You, but I Trust You: Caring About Social Issues Signals Integrity
By: Julian Zlatev
What characteristics of an individual signal trustworthiness to other people? I propose that individuals who care about contentious social issues signal to observers that they have integrity and thus can be trusted. Critically, this signal conveys trustworthiness... View Details
- 2019
- Chapter
A Claim to Own Productive Property
By: Nien-hê Hsieh
BOOK ABSTRACT: The status of economic liberties remains a serious lacuna in the theory and practice of human rights. Should a minimally just society protect the freedoms to sell, save, profit, and invest? Is being prohibited to run a business a human rights violation?... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Rehabilitating Corporate Purpose
In this paper, I address how the ascendance of the theory of shareholder value maximization into the central consciousness of public corporations and its canonization as the only legitimate expression of corporate purpose has contributed to both a widening breach... View Details
- 2019
- Book
Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt
By: Arthur C. Brooks
To get ahead today, you have to be a jerk, right?
Divisive politicians. Screaming heads on television. Angry campus activists. Twitter trolls. Today in America, there is an “outrage industrial complex” that prospers by setting American against... View Details
Divisive politicians. Screaming heads on television. Angry campus activists. Twitter trolls. Today in America, there is an “outrage industrial complex” that prospers by setting American against... View Details
- 2019
- Chapter
Behavioral Economics and Health-Care Markets
By: Amitabh Chandra, Benjamin Handel and Joshua Schwartzstein
This chapter summarizes research in behavioral health economics, focusing on insurance markets and product markets in health care. We argue that the prevalence of choice difficulties and biases leading to mistakes in these markets establish a special place for them in... View Details