Publications
Publications
Show Results For
-
All HBS Web
(1,521)
- Faculty Publications (137)
Page 1 of
137
Results
→
Are you looking for?
- March 29, 2021
- Editorial
Research: A Little Recognition Can Provide a Big Morale Boost
By: Shibeal O'Flaherty, Michael Sanders and Ashley V. Whillans
As organizations large and small face the twin challenges of increasingly strained budgets and burned out workforces, what can managers do to keep employees engaged—without breaking the bank? In this piece, the authors share new research on the power of symbolic awards...
View Details
- 2021
- Book
Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere
By: Tsedal Neeley
The rapid and unprecedented changes brought on by COVID-19 have accelerated the transition to remote working, requiring the wholesale migration of nearly entire companies to virtual work in just weeks, leaving managers and employees scrambling to adjust. This massive...
View Details
- March 2021
- Article
Opting-in to Prosocial Incentives
By: Daniel Schwartz, Elizabeth A. Keenan, Alex Imas and Ayelet Gneezy
The design of effective incentive schemes that are both successful in motivating employees and keeping down costs is of critical importance. Research has demonstrated that prosocial incentives, where individuals’ effort benefits a charitable organization, can sometimes...
View Details
- January 2021
- Teaching Note
Ureed.com: The Marketplace for Language
This case explores the growth of Ureed, an online marketplace for translation services that is powered by a workforce consisting of remote freelancers who are based in the United Arab Emirates. Nour Al Hassan, the founder and CEO faced the challenge of how best to...
View Details
- 2021
- Article
Helping and Happiness: A Review and Guide for Public Policy
By: Lara B. Aknin and Ashley V. Whillans
Perhaps one of the most reaffirming findings to emerge over the past several decades is that humans not only engage in generous behavior, they also appear to experience pleasure from doing so. Yet not all acts of helping lead to greater happiness. Here, we review the...
View Details
- November 2020
- Teaching Note
Social Salary Setting at Spiber
By: Ashley Whillans and John Beshears
This case tells the story of Spiber, a Japanese technology start-up company. To reflect the company’s values, the leadership team implemented a new and unique salary-setting process: each employee had the authority to choose their own salary. In the course of...
View Details
- August 2020
- Article
Workplace Knowledge Flows
By: Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma, Nathan Seegert and Christopher Stanton
We conducted a field experiment in a sales firm to test whether improving knowledge flows between coworkers affects productivity. Our design allows us to compare different management practices and to isolate whether frictions to knowledge transmission primarily reside...
View Details
- Article
Forgoing Earned Incentives to Signal Pure Motives
By: Erika L. Kirgios, Edward H. Chang, Emma E. Levine, Katherine L. Milkman and Judd B. Kessler
Policy makers, employers, and insurers often provide financial incentives to encourage citizens, employees, and customers to take actions that are good for them or for society (e.g., energy conservation, healthy living, safe driving). Although financial incentives are...
View Details
- June 2020 (Revised March 2020)
- Case
Social Salary Setting at Spiber
By: Ashley Whillans and John Beshears
Can a “set your own salary” system boost employee happiness and motivation? Spiber made synthetic silk built from proteins mimicking the proteins found in spider silk, the world’s toughest known material by weight. Kazuhide Sekiyama and Junichi Sugahara established...
View Details
- March 2020 (Revised August 2020)
- Case
Culture at Google
By: Nien-hê Hsieh, Amy Klopfenstein and Sarah Mehta
Beginning in 2017, technology (tech) company Google faced a series of employee-relations issues that threatened its unique culture of innovation and open communication. Issues included protests surrounding Google’s contracts with the U.S. government, restrictions of...
View Details
Keywords:
Human Resources;
Employee Relationship Management;
Recruitment;
Retention;
Resignation and Termination;
Labor;
Working Conditions;
Employment;
Labor Unions;
Wages;
Law;
Lawsuits and Litigation;
Rights;
Ethics;
Values and Beliefs;
Fairness;
Organizations;
Organizational Culture;
Mission and Purpose;
Social Psychology;
Attitudes;
Behavior;
Conflict Management;
Trust;
Motivation and Incentives;
Prejudice and Bias;
Power and Influence;
Technology;
Search Technology;
Web;
Hardware;
Society;
Social Issues;
Culture;
Civil Society or Community;
Demographics;
Diversity;
Ethnicity;
Gender;
Race;
Technology Industry;
North and Central America;
United States;
California
- March 2020 (Revised October 2020)
- Module Note
Sales Force Compensation
By: Doug J. Chung
The author developed this note for scholars, educators, and practitioners that are interested in sales force compensation. It is based on the author’s investigations across a variety of organizations in multiple industries and provides a conceptual framework for the...
View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Incentive Effects of Subjective Allocations of Rewards and Penalties
By: Wei Cai, Susanna Gallani and Jee Eun Shin
We examine the incentive effects of subjective adjustments in the allocation of tournament-based financial rewards and penalties based on performance rankings. We use data from a company where the reward and penalty allocations are based on a combination of objective...
View Details
Keywords:
Compensation Interdependence;
Nominal And Opportunity Effects;
Managerial Discretion;
Performance Measurement;
Subjectivity;
Rewards;
Expectancy Theory;
Tournament-based Incentives;
Penalties;
Tournaments;
Reciprocity Theory;
Employees;
Compensation and Benefits;
Management;
Decisions;
Performance;
Measurement and Metrics
- February 2020
- Article
Effects of a Tournament Incentive Plan Incorporating Managerial Discretion in a Geographically Dispersed Organization
By: Carolyn Deller and Tatiana Sandino
Using retail chain data, we study the effects of a tournament incentive plan based primarily on objective performance, but incorporating managerial discretion in the selection of winners. In principle, such plans could motivate employees to perform both at a high...
View Details
- January 2020
- Case
Ureed.com: The Marketplace for Language
By: Ashley V. Whillans, Esel Çekin and Alpana Thapar
Jordanian entrepreneur, Nour Al Hassan, founded Tarjama in 2008, tapping into an underserved and high demand need: Arabic translation service. Its lean model comprised of hiring full-time employees, mainly women, who worked from home. It steadily grew over the...
View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Recognition Incentives for Internal Crowdsourcing: A Field Experiment at NASA
By: Jana Gallus, Olivia S. Jung and Karim R. Lakhani
What might motivate employees to participate in internal crowdsourcing, a peer-based approach to innovation? Should organizations use incentives that are congruent with their established hierarchical structures, or should they use incentives that are aligned with the...
View Details
- September 2019
- Case
Shell: A Company of Opportunity?
By: Joseph B. Fuller and Emer Moloney
The Opportunity Hub was a cloud-based platform that enabled managers to market projects they were working on and associated resourcing needs as “Opportunity Owners” and employees, or “Opportunity Seekers,” to browse these statements of need and engage when they had...
View Details
Keywords:
Business Divisions;
Change Management;
Competency and Skills;
Experience and Expertise;
Talent and Talent Management;
Energy;
Energy Sources;
Non-Renewable Energy;
Renewable Energy;
Human Resources;
Employees;
Retention;
Collaborative Innovation and Invention;
Innovation and Management;
Innovation Strategy;
Technological Innovation;
Jobs and Positions;
Job Design and Levels;
Knowledge Sharing;
Knowledge;
Knowledge Use and Leverage;
Labor;
Human Capital;
Labor Unions;
Leading Change;
Resource Allocation;
Organizational Change and Adaptation;
Performance Evaluation;
Performance Productivity;
Strategic Planning;
Projects;
Motivation and Incentives;
Business Strategy;
Social and Collaborative Networks;
Technology Platform;
Chemical Industry;
Energy Industry;
Information Technology Industry;
Technology Industry;
United Kingdom;
Netherlands
- August 2019
- Case
Bark Gift Shop Ltd.
By: Susanna Gallani, Jan Bouwens and Peter Kroos
This case describes a setting in which the CFO of Bark Gift Shop Ltd., a gift items retailer, discovers an undesired pattern in the performance data suggesting that her shop managers that perform well during the first part of the year, purposely reduce their effort in...
View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
Connecting the Dots: Superordinate Framing Enhances the Value of Unimportant Tasks
By: Jaewon Yoon, A.V. Whillans and Ed O'Brien
Each day, people begrudgingly complete mundane tasks. Four experiments (N = 3,502; two pre-registered) reveal that a simple intervention—superordinate framing—can enhance people’s task experiences. In two initial experiments, working adults were asked to describe...
View Details
- July 24, 2019
- Article
How to Make Even the Most Mundane Tasks More Motivating
By: Jaewon Yoon, A.V. Whillans and Ed O'Brien
Managers constantly encourage employees to think about why they do the work they do in order to give them a sense of purpose and fight against demotivation. But our latest research—with nearly 4,000 working adults in the U.S.—suggests that this hyperfocus on purpose...
View Details
- June 2019
- Case
Athena Bancorp
By: Leonard A. Schlesinger and Sarah Abbott
Athena Bancorp was founded in 2016 by Beth Daniels, a banking professional with 15 years of experience in the industry. Daniels took advantage of what she perceived as a gap in the market caused by recent industry consolidation, a decreasing industry focus on branch...
View Details