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  • 16 Nov 2021
  • HBS Case

How a Company Made Employees So Miserable, They Killed Themselves

attendance and behavior, asked some workers to reapply for their jobs, and gave what seemed like unmanageable workloads to others. Some employees returned from vacation to find that a company car, badge, or desk had been stripped from... View Details
Keywords: by Michael Blanding
  • 16 May 2023
  • HBS Case

How KKR Got More by Giving Ownership to the Factory Floor: ‘My Kids Are Going to College!’

workers like his father a share of the profits and get them to think like owners. The case studies, written by HBS Professor Dennis Campbell and assistant professor Ethan Rouen, describe the sea change in motivation that happens when... View Details
Keywords: by Avery Forman
  • December 2015
  • Background Note

Incentive Systems

By: Brian J. Hall
This note serves as a supplement to any course on incentive design within organizations. The note focuses on the principal difficulties in designing incentive systems, including the tradeoff between objective and subjective performance metrics, how to design incentive... View Details
Keywords: Organizational Strategy; Compensation and Benefits; Motivation and Incentives; Performance Evaluation; Strategy
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  • 17 Sep 2012
  • Research & Ideas

Blue Skies, Distractions Arise: How Weather Affects Productivity

Autumn has sprung, and the cold, dreary days of winter are around the corner. But take heart, wistful sun lovers. It turns out that lousy weather is actually good for business operations. A new research paper reports that a decrease in sunny weather is directly related... View Details
Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

    Lauren Rice

    Lauren is a doctoral student in the Business Economics program. Her research interests include finance, development economics, health economics, and industrial organization. He graduated from Harvard College in 2020, where he studied Economics and... View Details
    • 29 Nov 2021
    • Research & Ideas

    How Bonuses Get Employees to Choose Work Over Family

    pay—and that has the potential to lay the groundwork for an overworked, unhappy existence, according to research by Ashley Whillans, an assistant professor in Harvard Business School’s Negotiation, Organizations, and Markets Unit. The research shows that View Details
    Keywords: by Rachel Kim Raczka
    • May 2012
    • Article

    Incentive Schemes, Sorting and Behavioral Biases of Employees: Experimental Evidence

    By: Ian Larkin and Stephen Leider
    We investigate how the convexity of a firm's incentives interacts with worker overconfidence to affect sorting decisions and performance. We demonstrate experimentally that overconfident employees are more likely to sort into a non-linear incentive scheme over a linear... View Details
    Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Performance; Behavior; Prejudice and Bias; Decisions; Employees; Wages
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    • 27 Feb 2023
    • Research & Ideas

    How One Late Employee Can Hurt Your Business: Data from 25 Million Timecards

    deviations on the performance of individual stores in a new study. “One employee being late or absent can negatively affect not only store operations, but also their coworkers by making them stay to make up for the lost labor.” Ananth... View Details
    Keywords: by Ben Rand; Retail
    • 22 Oct 2021
    • Research & Ideas

    Want Hybrid Work to Succeed? Trust, Don’t Track, Employees

    workers over the past several months, Neeley says managers should keep three things in mind as they develop long-term plans for hybrid work. 1. Trust in employee autonomy While working from home, employees have enjoyed an unprecedented... View Details
    Keywords: by Michael Blanding
    • October 2013 (Revised November 2021)
    • Case

    Cynthia Carroll at Anglo American (A)

    By: Gautam Mukunda, Lisa Mazzanti and Aldo Sesia
    In 2007, Cynthia Carroll, the newly-appointed chief executive of mining giant Anglo American, was considering shutting down mines in South Africa for safety reasons, namely worker fatalities. No company had ever done so before. Carroll felt that operating a company... View Details
    Keywords: Culture; Leadership; Gender; Safety; Working Conditions; Business Exit or Shutdown; Organizational Culture; Change Management; Mining; Mining Industry; South Africa
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    • 24 Aug 2020
    • Research & Ideas

    How Much Will Remote Work Continue After the Pandemic?

    Are remote workers less productive? While past research suggests that many American workers could successfully perform their jobs from outside the office, companies have been... View Details
    Keywords: by Kristen Senz
    • 06 Jun 2018
    • Research & Ideas

    Cut Salaries or Cut People? The Best Way to Survive a Downturn

    eugeniek Companies looking to shed costs in an economic downturn rarely cut compensation—typically, they slash jobs instead. New research confirms the wisdom of that decision. The study concludes that when a company cuts employee pay the best View Details
    Keywords: by Rachel Layne
    • 01 Nov 2022
    • Research & Ideas

    A Penny for Your Thoughts? For Big-Picture Ideas, the Right Pay Structure Matters

    to focus employees on a particular task and base their pay on the workers’ performance need to be aware of the potential tradeoff when it comes to the willingness of workers to develop innovative ideas, she... View Details
    Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis
    • January–February 2022
    • Article

    Algorithm-Augmented Work and Domain Experience: The Countervailing Forces of Ability and Aversion

    By: Ryan Allen and Prithwiraj Choudhury
    How does a knowledge worker’s level of domain experience affect their algorithm-augmented work performance? We propose and test theoretical predictions that domain experience has countervailing effects on algorithm-augmented performance: on one hand, domain experience... View Details
    Keywords: Automation; Domain Experience; Algorithmic Aversion; Experts; Algorithms; Machine Learning; Future Of Work; Employees; Experience and Expertise; Decision Making; Performance
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    • May 2022
    • Article

    The Impact of COVID-19 on Digital Communication Patterns

    By: Evan DeFilippis, Stephen Michael Impink, Madison Singell, Jeff Polzer and Raffaella Sadun
    We explore the impact of COVID-19 on employees’ digital communication patterns through an event study of lockdowns in 16 large metropolitan areas in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Using de-identified, aggregated meeting and email meta-data from 3,143,270... View Details
    Keywords: Meetings; Email; COVID-19 Pandemic; Communication Technology; Health Pandemics; Time Management
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    • 2012
    • Article

    Specialization and Variety in Repetitive Tasks: Evidence from a Japanese Bank

    By: B. Staats and F. Gino
    Sustaining operational productivity in the completion of repetitive tasks is critical to many organizations' success. Yet research points to two different work-design-related strategies for accomplishing this goal: specialization to capture the benefits of repetition... View Details
    Keywords: Motivation; Productivity; Specialization; Variety; Work Fragmentation; Boundaries; Performance Productivity; Organizations; Research; Strategy; Motivation and Incentives; Opportunities; Market Transactions; Resource Allocation; Performance; Goals and Objectives; Learning
    Related
    • 22 Apr 2012
    • News

    The Pros and Cons of Hiring Outsiders

    • 03 Nov 2015
    • First Look

    November 3, 2015

    Workers By: Housman, Michael, and Dylan Minor Abstract—While there has been a lot of research on finding and developing top performers in the workplace, less attention has been paid to the question of how to... View Details
    Keywords: Sean Silverthorne
    • August 2012
    • Case

    Danshui Plant No. 2

    By: William Bruns, Julie H. Hertenstein and Kelvin Liu
    Danshui Plant No. 2 in southern China has a one-year contract with Apple Inc. to assemble 2.4 million iPhones. In the first three months of the contract, the plant is unable to assemble as many phones as expected and is operating at a loss. The plant manager must... View Details
    Keywords: Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Production; Budgets and Budgeting; Manufacturing Industry; Electronics Industry; China
    Related
    • 04 Sep 2021
    • News

    Companies Need More Workers. Why Do They Reject Millions of Résumés?