Faculty & Research

Facilitating faculty research and case development on an international scale

Our unprecedented network of research centers and regional offices in key areas of the world enable faculty to work with leaders, industry, government, and academia worldwide, and to learn from business challenges and innovations wherever they occur. Through sustained work in the field, faculty are provided the opportunity to immerse themselves in the culture and values – as well as intricacies and nuances – that lead to truly meaningful and insightful global research.

Research Centers & Offices

More than half the faculty are actively involved in international research, developing high-impact cases and course materials on relevant global issues and innovations.

New Research

July 2022
Article
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

When Alterations Are Violations: Moral Outrage and Punishment in Response to (Even Minor) Alterations to Rituals

By: Daniel H. Stein, Juliana Schroeder, Nicholas M. Hobson, Francesca Gino and Michael I. Norton

From Catholics performing the sign of the cross since the 4th century to Americans reciting the Pledge of Allegiance since the 1890s, group rituals (i.e., predefined sequences of symbolic actions) have strikingly consistent features over time. Seven studies (N = 4,213) document the sacrosanct nature of rituals: Because group rituals symbolize sacred group values, even minor alterations to them provoke moral outrage and punishment. In Pilot Studies A and B, fraternity members who failed to complete initiation activities that were more ritualistic elicited relatively greater moral outrage and hazing from their fraternity brothers. Study 1 uses secular holiday rituals to explore the dimensions of ritual alteration— both physical and psychological—that elicit moral outrage. Study 2 suggests that altering a ritual elicits outrage even beyond the extent to which the ritual alteration is seen as violating descriptive and injunctive norms. In Study 3, group members who viewed male circumcision as more ritualistic (i.e., Jewish vs. Muslim participants) expressed greater moral outrage in response to a proposal to alter circumcision to make it safer. Study 4 uses the Pledge of Allegiance ritual to explore how the intentions of the person altering the ritual influence observers’ moral outrage and punishment. Finally, in Study 5, even minor alterations elicited comparable levels of moral outrage to major alterations of the Jewish Passover ritual. Across both religious and secular rituals, the more ingroup members believed that rituals symbolize sacred group values, the more they protected their rituals—by punishing those who violated them.

July 2022
Article
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

What Do I Make of the Rest of My Life? Global and Quotidian Life Construal across the Retirement Transition

By: Jeff Steiner and Teresa M. Amabile

Retirement means relinquishing the daily structure that work provides and the career-dependent meanings that it offers life narratives. The retirement transition can therefore involve contemplating both how to spend newly-freed daily time and the implications of retirement for one’s life narrative. We investigate how American professionals construe their working and retirement lives, in a qualitative study drawing on 215 interviews with 120 participants, including 12 interviewed longitudinally throughout their years-long retirement transitions. We identify two orthogonal dimensions for contemplating the work and retirement domains of one’s life—global and quotidian life construal—and four basic modes of cognition that arise from variability across these dimensions. We induce a theoretical model describing how construal of working life prefigures construal of retirement life, which then shapes the retirement life experience. This study contributes to construal level theory, narrative psychology, and the literatures on retirement transitions and the meaning of work.

July 2022
Article
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

The Passionate Pygmalion Effect: Passionate Employees Attain Better Outcomes in Part Because of More Preferential Treatment by Others

By: Ke Wang, Erica R. Bailey and Jon M. Jachimowicz

Employees are increasingly exhorted to “pursue their passion” at work. Inherent in this call is the belief that passion will produce higher performance because it promotes intrapersonal processes that propel employees forward. Here, we suggest that the pervasiveness of this “passion narrative,” coupled with the relative observability of passion, may lead others to treat passionate employees in more favorable ways that subsequently produce better workplace outcomes, a self-fulfilling prophecy we term the Passionate Pygmalion Effect. We find evidence for this effect across two experiments (Study 1 and pre-registered Study 3) and one field survey with pairs of subordinates and supervisors from a diverse set of organizations (Study 2). In line with the Passionate Pygmalion Effect, our studies show that more passionate employees (1) received more positive feedback for their success, (2) were offered more training and promotion opportunities, (3) elicited more favorable emotional reactions, and (4) prompted more favorable attributions for varied performance outcomes. Such favorable treatment persisted despite describing passionate employees' job performance identically or controlling for job performance statistically. Notably, more passionate employees even elicited more favorable emotional reactions and attributions when their job performance decreased. We subsequently discuss how our interpersonal perspective on the passion narrative implicates challenges for the advancement of employees with fewer opportunities to pursue their passion (e.g., given socioeconomic constraints or exploitative work demands), or who are less likely to be perceived as passionate by others (e.g., given cross-cultural differences).

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Global Colloquium for participant-centered learning

For senior faculty at top business schools in emerging economies who want to be trained in interactive methods of teaching and learning. GloColl comprises a seven-day session held on the HBS campus, followed by a three-day session held in two cities in Asia, Europe, or Latin America each year.

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In The News

- 23 Jun 2022
- Harvard Business Review
As the World Shifts, So Should Leaders

By: Nitin Nohria
- 17 Jun 2022
- The Hill
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By: Willy Shih
- 15 Jun 2022
- The Hill
New Shipping Legislation Targets Supply Chain Bottleneck

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