Publications

SSRN

10 Jan 2023
Research & Ideas

How to Live Happier in 2023: Diversify Your Social Circle

The classic advice to investors is to diversify—put wealth into a combination of assets. Perhaps some cash goes into mutual funds, some in blue chips, and a little in growth stocks, spreading out risk as well as opportunity. What if people thought about investments in... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

January 1992 (Revised December 1994)
Background Note

Note on E-Mail and Privacy: U.S. Law and Company Policies

By: Lynn S. Paine

Describes the legal landscape of employee privacy as it applies to e-mail interception: the various legal theories on which a privacy claim might be based and proposed federal legislation relevant to the subject. Also describes the policies companies like UPS,... View Details

Keywords: Risk and Uncertainty; Information; Rights; Government Legislation; Internet and the Web; Interpersonal Communication; Ethics; Theory; Policy; Employees

16 Jun 2009
First Look

First Look: June 16

on these teams. As non-native English speakers attempted to counter the apprehension they felt when having to speak English, and native English speakers fought against feeling excluded and devalued, a cycle of negative emotion ensued and disrupted View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

16 Feb 2024
Research & Ideas

Is Your Workplace Biased Against Introverts?

Managers almost universally say they want to see passion in their employees. Yet sometimes, they can’t spot it when it’s right in front of them. Extroverted employees are more likely to be considered passionate compared to more introverted colleagues—even if it’s not... View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand

03 Feb 2009
First Look

First Look: February 3, 2009

Persuasion Author: Eric J. Van den Steen Abstract 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... View Details

Keywords: Martha Lagace

Forthcoming
Article

Serving with a Smile on Airbnb: Analyzing the Economic Returns and Behavioral Underpinnings of the Host’s Smile

By: Shunyuan Zhang, Elizabeth Friedman, Kannan Srinivasan, Ravi Dhar and Xupin Zhang

Non-informational cues, such as facial expressions, can significantly influence judgments and interpersonal impressions. While past research has explored how smiling affects business outcomes in offline or in-store contexts, relatively less is known about how smiling... View Details

Keywords: Sharing Economy; Airbnb; Image Feature Extraction; Machine Learning; Facial Expressions; Prejudice and Bias; Nonverbal Communication; E-commerce; Consumer Behavior; Perception

17 Dec 2012
Research & Ideas

Teaming in the Twenty-First Century

done, we've got to focus on the interpersonal processes and dynamics that occur among people working together for shorter durations." This means that people have to get good at "teaming"—reaching out, getting up to speed, establishing... View Details

Keywords: by Maggie Starvish

05 Apr 2004
Research & Ideas

Six Ways to Build Trust in Negotiations

factor in negotiation? You might provide references from mutually trusted third parties that vouch for your character and competence. If appropriate, a third party could communicate with the other side prior to the negotiation—as in the... View Details

Keywords: by Deepak Malhotra

04 Oct 2010
Research & Ideas

Introverts: The Best Leaders for Proactive Employees

Luther King, Jr., and Jack Welch, great leaders are extraverted: their behavior is bold, talkative, energetic, active, assertive, and adventurous. This enables them to communicate a strong, dominant vision that inspires followers to... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel

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

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Employees; Managerial Roles; Alliances; Value Creation

Purchase

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

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Experience and Expertise; Learning; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Groups and Teams; Familiarity; Identity; Cooperation

October–December 2023
Article

A Practical Guide to Conversation Research: How to Study What People Say to Each Other

By: Michael Yeomans, Katelynn Boland, Hanne K. Collins, Nicole Abi-Esber and Alison Wood Brooks

Conversation—a verbal interaction between two or more people—is a complex, pervasive, and consequential human behavior. Conversations have been studied across many academic disciplines. However, advances in recording and analysis techniques over the last decade have... View Details

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Analytics and Data Science; Research

2012
Working Paper

What Do Managers Do? Exploring Persistent Performance Differences among Seemingly Similar Enterprises

By: Robert Gibbons and Rebecca Henderson

Social networks and social groups have both been seen as important to discouraging malfeasance and supporting the global pro-social norms that underlie social order, but have typically been treated either as pure substitutes or as having completely independent effects.... View Details

Keywords: Social Norms; Social Networks; Triadic Closure; Social Groups; Group Identity; Groups and Teams; Identity; Performance Consistency; Social and Collaborative Networks; Societal Protocols; Social Media

January 1992 (Revised August 1992)
Case

Lexon Corp. (A)

By: Lynn S. Paine

A general manager at Lexon Computer Corp. must decide whether interception and surveillance of employees' e-mail is acceptable company practice, and whether to follow the advice of his computer operations manager who wants to fire the person who complained that the... View Details

Keywords: Information; Rights; Managerial Roles; Interpersonal Communication; Employee Relationship Management; Ethics; Computer Industry

Educators

Purchase

January 1992 (Revised August 1992)
Case

Lexon Corp. (B)

By: Lynn S. Paine

Lexon Corp. lawyers must decide how to respond to two lawsuits challenging the company's interception of electronic mail on privacy grounds. They must also formulate a company policy on e-mail. One suit was filed by an employee dismissed from her job after asking that... View Details

Keywords: Information; Rights; Managerial Roles; Interpersonal Communication; Employee Relationship Management; Ethics; Lawsuits and Litigation; Computer Industry; California

Educators

Purchase

13 Jun 2022
Research & Ideas

Extroverts, Your Colleagues Wish You Would Just Shut Up and Listen

Employees with outgoing personalities may seem like they could charm their way to the top of any company. But there’s a down side to being the life of the party, according to new research: People often assume their extroverted colleagues are poor listeners. In... View Details

Keywords: by Pamela Reynolds

06 Oct 2023
Book

Yes, You Can Radically Change Your Organization in One Week

strengthen the relationship at the core of the problem. Brainstorm and test strategies for building or rebuilding trust. Frei: “If there is a problem, in our experience, trust is broken down. Any time you have interpersonal challenges, we... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz

Article

The Performer's Reactions to Procedural Injustice: When Prosocial Identity Reduces Prosocial Behavior

By: Adam M. Grant, Andrew Molinsky, Joshua D. Margolis, Melissa Kamin and William Schiano

Considerable research has examined how procedural injustice affects victims and witnesses of unfavorable outcomes, with little attention to the “performers” who deliver these outcomes. Drawing on dissonance theory, we hypothesized that performers' reactions to... View Details

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Judgments; Fairness; Outcome or Result; Behavior; Identity; Power and Influence

May–June 2018
Article

The Surprising Power of Questions

By: Alison Wood Brooks and Leslie K. John

Much of an executive’s workday is spent asking others for information—requesting status updates from a team leader, for example, or questioning a counterpart in a tense negotiation. Yet unlike professionals such as litigators, journalists, and doctors, who are taught... View Details

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Communication Strategy; Information; Knowledge Sharing; Performance Effectiveness