Faculty & Research
Leslie A. Perlow

Leslie A. Perlow

Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership

Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership

Organizational Behavior
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Leslie A. Perlow
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Featured Work Publications Research Summary Awards & Honors

Leslie Perlow is the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership in the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School. She has recently launched a new second year elective, Crafting Your Life: The Tactics and Practices of The First 10 Years Post MBA. This course encourages students to be more intentional about their choices, and provides guidance to help them in terms of managing their careers, relationships, and lives.

Professor Perlow’s research focuses on the micro-dynamics of work. She studies how individuals act within an organization – i.e., what do people do all day, how do they spend their time, with whom do they interact– and the consequences for organizations and individuals. She documents individuals’ work practices including the use of technology, meetings, virtual interactions, and managing across cultures with global teams, and explores the implications of these practices for organization productivity, individuals’ careers, and family lives. Professor Perlow has recently launched a large study in a professional service firm to explore the transition from collocated to virtual to the new normal (increasingly hybrid) work.  She combines deep inductive qualitative research with data analytics to better understand and empower teams to improve the way they work.

Before joining the Harvard faculty, Professor Perlow was on the faculty of the University of Michigan Business School. She earned her B.A. in Economics from Princeton University and her Ph.D. in Organization Studies from MIT. Prior to her academic career, she worked as a management consultant.

Featured Work
Manage Your Team's Collective Time
Time management is a group endeavor. Harvard Business School Professor Leslie Perlow shares how the payoff goes far beyond morale and retention.
Sleeping with Your Smartphone
How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work
Does it have to be this way? Can't resist checking your smartphone or mobile device? Sure, all this connectivity keeps you in touch with your team and the office--but at what cost? In "Sleeping with Your Smartphone," Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow reveals how you can disconnect and become more productive in the process. In fact, she shows that you can devote more time to your personal life and accomplish more at work.
TED Institute
Leslie Perlow: Thriving in an overconnected world
While email and mobile technology have greatly accelerated the way we do business, Leslie Perlow argues that the always “on” mentality can have a long-term detrimental effect on many organizations. In her sociological experiments at BCG and other organizations, Perlow found that if the team – rather than just individuals - collectively rallies around a goal of personal value, it unleashes a process that creates better work and better lives.
The Economist Intelligence Unit report
The Personalization Challenge: Business culture and mobile security
Video Interview: EIU Editor Riva Richmond interviews Harvard Business School Professor Leslie Perlow about the risks to organisations from the undirected, always-connected work enabled by mobile devices.
Switching off an "Always on" Culture
Leslie talks about the pervasive responsiveness trap in the workforce.

“The problem is that now everyone's on all the time and we come to expect that of each other. And then, we email each other late at night and we actually may or may not expect a response, initially.  But the person getting the e-mail, their response is, 'Well, maybe it’s not urgent but I should respond anyway and maybe it’s because I want to prove that had it been the clients, I was on.'"
Books
Journal Articles
Book Chapters
  • Perlow, Leslie. "Collaborative Implementation: 'What If,' Asked George?" In Research Alive: Exploring Generative Moments in Doing Qualitative Research. Vol. 27, edited by Arne Carlsen and Jane E. Dutton. Advances in Organization Studies. Copenhagen Business School Press, 2011. View Details
  • Trefalt, Spela, and Leslie Perlow. "Learning from Women Who Make It Work: A Call for Dynamic Flexibility." In Qualitative Organizational Research: Best Papers from the Davis Conference on Qualitative Research, edited by K. Elsbach, 227–251. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing (IAP), 2005. View Details
  • Perlow, Leslie. "Studying Work Groups in India, China, and Hungary." In Gaining Access: A Practical Guide for Field Researchers, edited by Martha S. Feldman, Jeannine Bell, and Michele Tracy Berger. Altamira Press, 2003. View Details
  • Perlow, Leslie, and L. Bailyn. "The Senseless Submergence of Difference: Engineers, Their Work and Their Careers." In Between Technology and Society: Technical Workers in Modern Workplaces, edited by B. Barley and J. Orr. Ithaca, NY: IRL Press, 1997. View Details
Cases and Teaching Materials
Research Summary
Research Summary
There has been tremendous change in the workplace — ubiquitous technology, 24/7 globalization and hyper-efficiency. Professor Perlow’s research focuses on the implications for the ways we work and live, and what we can do to improve both. She finds we have become less efficient, unable to plan or prioritize work; less effective, with speed substituting for strategy and innovation; more isolated, as technology (paradoxically) reduces real human interaction; overwhelmed, unable to plan or collaborate; and more harried, as the dividing line between work and home disappears. She further finds that change is possible – change that results in better work and better lives.

As an ethnographer, Professor Perlow does in-depth studies, often for years at a time. Her work to date has been based predominantly on firms in high tech, professional services, and pharmaceuticals. She has studied companies with co-located teams and global teams. She has lived for months at a time in both China and India.

Recent projects include 1) the sudden transition to virtual work and all the implications for teams, in particular team collaboration and learning; 2) the study of meetings and their deeper roots in the way we organize and execute work; 3) the study of team dynamics as they are experienced simultaneously by team members in different locations (having researchers at multiple sites at the same time); 4) the effects of being connected 24-7.

Professor Perlow has further been developing and implementing a change process that revolves around empowering groups of people to rally around a collective goal, catalyzing a process of innovating and improving how they do their work. Most recently she is experimenting with data analytics as a source of learning and change.

Nearly ten years ago, she embarked on an ambitious project to understand the temporal demands in professional service work and whether change was possible. People in professional service firms work long hours and are expected to make work their top priority. If something comes up, they stay late. When not at work, they check their wireless devices to ensure that nothing new has come up. Moreover, they put up with this pressure to always be available because they believe that to be successful in a professional service firm, you have to be accessible and willing to jump into action whenever called. But does it have to be this way? To explore this question, Professor Perlow conducted a set of experiments, attempting to create predictable time off. She discovered that change could be made such that not only individuals but also the organization benefited. Based on the success of these experiments, the firm has begun to transform its world-wide organization culture into one that values people's personal lives as part of making the work itself most effective and efficient. Professor Perlow has continued to build on these learnings, continuing to create change—and study the change process—in a wide range of organizations and industries.

For recent updates, visit LeslieAPerlow.com
Awards & Honors
Recipient of the 2012 Work Life Legacy Award from the Families and Work Institute.
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