Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,205)
- Faculty Publications (423)
- 2018
- Chapter
Work and Workplace
By: Kai Ruggeri, Jana Berkessel, Jascha Achterberg, Gerhard M. Prinz, Alessandra Luna-Navarro, Jon M. Jachimowicz and A. V. Whillans
Work is a major part of many lives. While individual experiences with work will differ—from how long we work to what jobs we have and to what extent we enjoy them—almost everyone is affected by employment, whether they have a job or not. Decades of research in the... View Details
- Article
Enacting Rituals to Improve Self-control
By: D. A. Tian, J. Schroeder, G. Haubl, J. Risen, M. I. Norton and F. Gino
Rituals are predefined sequences of actions characterized by rigidity and repetition. We propose that enacting ritualized actions can enhance subjective feelings of self-discipline, such that rituals can be harnessed to improve behavioral self-control. We test this... View Details
- Article
The Asymmetric Experience of Positive and Negative Economic Growth: Global Evidence Using Subjective Well-being Data
By: Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, George Ward, Femke De Keulenaer, Bert Van Landeghem, Georgios Kavetsos and Michael I. Norton
Are individuals more sensitive to losses than gains in terms of economic growth? We find that measures of subjective well-being are more than twice as sensitive to negative as compared to positive economic growth. We use Gallup World Poll data from over 150 countries,... View Details
- April 2018
- Case
Happy UAE
By: Joshua Schwartzstein, Brian J. Hall, Tiffany Y. Chang, Karim Sameh and Alpana Thapar
This case centers on the United Arab Emirates' (UAE) national goal of raising the happiness of its residents and visitors through ambitious government initiatives. They combined this bold national goal with an accountability structure (incentive plan) built on Key... View Details
- Article
Beating the Odds: Leadership Lessons from Senior African-American Women
Any list of top CEOs reveals a stunning lack of diversity. Among the leaders of Fortune 500 companies, for example, just 32 are women, three are African-American, and not one is an African-American woman. What’s going on? The authors studied the careers of the roughly... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Backhanded Compliments: How Negative Comparisons Undermine Flattery
By: Ovul Sezer, Alison Wood Brooks and Michael I. Norton
Seven studies (N = 2352) examine backhanded compliments—seeming praise that draws a comparison with a negative standard—a distinct self-presentation strategy with two simultaneous goals: eliciting liking (“Your speech was good…”) and conveying status (“…for a woman”).... View Details
- February 2018
- Article
Laboratory Evidence on the Effects of Sponsorship on the Competitive Preferences of Men and Women
By: Nancy R. Baldiga and Katherine Baldiga Coffman
Sponsorship programs have been proposed as one way to promote female advancement in competitive career fields. A sponsor is someone who advocates for a protégé, and in doing so, takes a stake in her success. We use a laboratory experiment to explore two channels... View Details
- 2018
- Chapter
Time, Money, and Subjective Wellbeing
By: Cassie Mogilner, A.V. Whillans and Michael I. Norton
Time and money are scarce and precious resources: people experience stress about having insufficient time and worry about having insufficient money. This chapter reviews research showing that the ways in which people spend their time and money, the tradeoffs that... View Details
- December 2017
- Article
Discordant vs. Harmonious Selves: The Effects of Identity Conflict and Enhancement on Sales Performance in Employee-Customer Interactions
By: Lakshmi Ramarajan, Nancy Rothbard and Steffanie Wilk
Across multiple studies, we examine how identity conflict and enhancement within people affect performance in tasks that involve interactions between people through two mechanisms: role-immersion, operationalized as intrinsic motivation, and role-taking,... View Details
- Article
Gender, Social Class, and Women's Employment
By: Kathleen L. McGinn and Eunsil Oh
People in low-power positions, whether due to gender or class, tend to exhibit other-oriented rather than self-oriented behavior. Women’s experiences at work and at home are shaped by social class, heightening identification with gender for relatively upper class women... View Details
- 2017
- Article
The Energizing Nature of Work Engagement: Toward a New Need-Based Theory of Work Motivation
By: Paul Green, Eli Finkel, Grainne Fitzsimons and Francesca Gino
We present theory suggesting that experiences at work that meet employees’ expectations of need fulfillment drive work engagement. Employees have needs (e.g., a desire to be authentic) and they also have expectations for how their job or their organization will fulfill... View Details
- Article
Are You Suited for a Start-up?
By: Jeffrey Bussgang
Relative to established organizations, start-ups can be hard to figure out. What are the jobs to be done? The best entry points? How can you tell whether a company has potential for success and is the right fit for you?
The author advises that you first assess... View Details
- Article
The Career Effects of Scandal: Evidence from Scientific Retractions
By: Pierre Azoulay, Alessandro Bonatti and Joshua Lev Krieger
We investigate how the scientific community's perception of a scientist's prior work changes when one of his articles is retracted. Relative to non-retracted control authors, faculty members who experience a retraction see the citation rate to their earlier,... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Shopping for Confirmation: How Disconfirming Feedback Shapes Social Networks
By: Paul Green Jr., Francesca Gino and Bradley Staats
Many organizations employ interpersonal feedback processes as a structured means of informing and motivating employee improvement. Ample evidence suggests that these feedback processes are largely ineffective, and despite a wealth of prescriptive literature, these... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Compensation Consultants and the Level, Composition, and Complexity of CEO Pay
By: Kevin J. Murphy and Tatiana Sandino
We provide fresh evidence regarding the relation between compensation consultants and CEO pay. First, firms that employ consultants have higher-paid CEOs—this result is robust to firm fixed effects and matching on economic and governance variables. Second, while this... View Details
- July 2017 (Revised December 2018)
- Case
Populism in America: Fake News, Alternative Facts and Elite Betrayal in the Trump Era
By: Rafael Di Tella and Sarah McAra
During the 2016 U.S. election, long-time politician Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, and celebrity billionaire Donald Trump, a Republican, faced off in a contentious race for president. In the primaries, candidates from both major political parties used anti-establishment... View Details
- Article
Dying Is Unexpectedly Positive
By: Amelia Goranson, Ryan S. Ritter, Adam Waytz, Michael I. Norton and Kurt Gray
In people’s imagination, dying seems dreadful; however, these perceptions may not reflect reality. In two studies, we compared the affective experience of people facing imminent death with that of people imagining imminent death. Study 1 revealed that blog posts of... View Details
Keywords: Death; Language; LIWC; Positivity; Affective Forecasting; Open Materials; Perspective; Attitudes
- May 2017 (Revised July 2017)
- Supplement
Aadhaar: From Voluntary to Mandatory
By: Tarun Khanna, Anjali Raina and Rachna Chawla
Approximately 1.1 billion residents of India (99% of the population) had a unique biometric identity—Aadhaar—by 2017. In six years, the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) had achieved an unprecedented milestone in emerging and developed markets. The... View Details
Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Business and Government Relations; Emerging Markets; Information; Information Technology; Organizational Design; Infrastructure; Identity; Projects; Information Management; Government and Politics; Digital Platforms; Internet and the Web; Transformation; Society; Welfare; Social Issues; Private Sector; Public Sector; Information Technology Industry; Asia; India; New Delhi
- May 2017
- Article
Behavioral Processes in Long-Lag Interventions
By: Dale T. Miller, Jennifer E. Dannals and Julian Zlatev
We argue that psychologists who conduct experiments with long lags between the manipulation and the outcome measure should pay more attention to behavioral processes that intervene between the manipulation and the outcome measure. Neglect of such processes, we contend,... View Details
- Article
Normative Judgments and Individual Essence
By: Julian De Freitas, Kevin P. Tobia, George E. Newman and Joshua Knobe
A growing body of research has examined how people judge the persistence of identity over
time—that is, how they decide that a particular individual is the same entity from one time to the
next. While a great deal of progress has been made in understanding the types... View Details
Keywords: Concepts; Essentialism; Normative Factors; Persistence; True Self; Morality; Identity; Moral Sensibility; Perception