Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(2,326)
- Faculty Publications (265)
- May – June 2011
- Article
Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth: How High Status Individuals Decrease Group Effectiveness
By: Boris Groysberg, Jeffrey T. Polzer and Hillary Anger Elfenbein
Can groups become effective simply by assembling high status individual performers? Though an affirmative answer may seem straightforward on the surface, this answer becomes more complicated when group members benefit from collaborating on interdependent tasks.... View Details
- April 2011
- Case
Designs by Kate: The Power of Direct Sales
By: John A. Deighton and Sarah Abbott
The sales representatives at Designs by Kate (DBK) sell private label jewelry at hosted parties and through online social media channels. They are also responsible for recruiting, training, and managing new sales reps. CEO and founder Kate Creevey designed the... View Details
- January – February 2011
- Article
Are You a Good Boss-Or a Great One?
By: Linda A. Hill and Kent Lineback
Private moments of doubt and fear come even to managers who have spent years on the job. Any number of events can trigger them: an initiative is going poorly; you get a lukewarm performance review; your new assignment is daunting. HBS professor Linda Hill and executive... View Details
- 2011
- Book
Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader
By: Linda A. Hill and Kent Lineback
You never dreamed being the boss would be so hard. You're caught in a web of conflicting expectations from subordinates, your supervisor, peers, and customers. You're constantly fighting fires. You're mired in office politics. You end each day exhausted and... View Details
- 2011
- Chapter
Developing an Effective Organization: Intervention Method, Empirical Evidence, and Theory
By: Michael Beer
The field of organization development is fragmented and lacks a coherent and integrated theory and method for developing an effective organization. A 20-year action research program led to the development and evaluation of the Strategic Fitness Process (SFP)-a platform... View Details
- 2011
- Chapter
Teams and Team Effectiveness in Health Services Organizations
By: Bruce J. Fried, Sharon Topping and Amy C. Edmondson
- October 2010
- Article
Organizational Designs and Innovation Streams
By: Michael Tushman, Wendy K. Smith, Robert Chapman Wood, George Westerman and Charles A. O'Reilly III
This article empirically explores the relations between alternative organizational designs and a firm's ability to explore as well as exploit. We operationalize exploitation and exploration in terms of innovation streams—incremental innovation in existing products as... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Performance Tradeoffs in Team Knowledge Sourcing
By: Bradley R. Staats, Melissa Valentine and Amy C. Edmondson
This research examines how teams organize knowledge sourcing (obtaining access to others' knowledge or expertise) and investigates the performance trade-offs involved in two approaches to knowledge sourcing in teams. One approach a team can take is to specialize, such... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Reversing the Queue: Performance, Legitimacy, and Minority Hiring
By: Andrew Hill and David A. Thomas
Studies of minority hiring have found that poor-performing firms or firms in highly competitive contexts are more likely to hire minority candidates. However, most work has examined hiring for entry and mid-level positions, not senior management. Management positions... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Will I Stay or Will I Go?: Cooperative and Competitive Effects of Workgroup Sex and Race Composition on Turnover
By: Kathleen L. McGinn and Katherine L Milkman
We develop an integrated theory of the social identity mechanisms linking workgroup sex and race composition across levels with individual turnover. Building on social identity research, we theorize that social cohesion (Tyler, 1999; Hogg and Terry, 2000) and social... View Details
Keywords: Competition; Ethnicity; Race; Groups and Teams; Identity; Resignation and Termination; Gender; Cooperation
- December 2009
- Article
Hiding the Evidence of Valid Theories: How Coupled Search Processes Obscure Performance Differences Among Organizations
By: Nicolaj Siggelkow and Jan Rivkin
Theorists argue that an organization's high-level choices, such as its organizational design or the attributes of its top management team, should influence its performance, yet empirical researchers have struggled to detect such influence. The impact of high-level... View Details
- September 2009
- Module Note
Leading Teams Note
This note, which describes the architecture and processes that characterize effective teams, begins by detailing the steps involved in designing a team, from diagnosing the complexity, interdependence, and objectives of the task to harnessing the key resources teams... View Details
- August 2009
- Case
Meeting the Diversity Challenge at PepsiCo: The Steve Reinemund Era
By: David A. Thomas and Stephanie Creary
This case profiles PepsiCo's diversity journey under the leadership of former chairman and CEO Steve Reinemund who instituted diversity as one of the company's strategic imperatives. It demonstrates the ways in which Reinemund partnered with his leadership team and... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Varied Experience, Team Familiarity, and Learning: The Mediating Role of Psychological Safety
By: Bradley R. Staats, Francesca Gino and Gary P. Pisano
Prior work examining the relationship of varied experience (i.e., the concurrent completion of multiple tasks) and learning by groups finds inconsistent results. We hypothesize that team familiarity, i.e, individuals' prior shared work experience, may help explain this... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Fluid Tasks and Fluid Teams: The Impact of Diversity in Experience and Team Familiarity on Team Performance
By: Robert S. Huckman and Bradley R. Staats
In this paper, we consider how the structures of tasks and teams interact to affect team performance. We study the effects of diversity in experience on a team's ability to respond to task changes, by separately examining interpersonal team diversity (i.e., differences... View Details
- 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
- January 2009
- Article
Team Familiarity, Role Experience, and Performance: Evidence from Indian Software Services
By: Robert S. Huckman, Bradley R. Staats and David M. Upton
Much of the literature on team learning views experience as a unidimensional concept captured by the cumulative production volume of, or the number of projects completed by, a team. Implicit in this approach is the assumption that teams are stable in their membership... View Details
- 2009
- Working Paper
Virtual Team Learning: Reflecting and Acting, Alone or With Others
By: Deborah L. Soule and Lynda M. Applegate
This paper examines virtual team learning in new product development situations. New product development activities manifest novelty, uncertainty and complexity, presenting an extreme need for learning in the course of the work. We present data from an exploratory... View Details
- November 2008
- Case
The Hong Kong & China Gas Company Ltd.: Negotiating Joint Ventures in China
By: James K. Sebenius, Michael Shih-ta Chen and Medha Samant
To deliver 5-6 major new Chinese joint ventures annually, Hong Kong China Gas executives began extracting cross-border negotiating lessons from their 80 existing Chinese JVs. Chairman Alfred Chan and CEO Peter Wong knew that HKGC's growth strategy required significant... View Details