MIT Sloan Management Review

Everyone knows conflict in the workplace is a bad thing, right? Perhaps not, answers a team of six researchers. Specifically, they found that Americans, as opposed to East Asians, seem to believe that they can overcome personal conflicts with co-workers when it comes to the pursuit of profits.I

William W. Maddux, assistant professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD and Adam D. Galinsky, associate professor of management and organization at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, conducted four studies of students placed in situations requiring creative insights.

Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently noted that in many cases, “old-fashioned corporate decision-making hasn’t caught up with new Information Age tools.” Indeed, companies must increasingly function as nodes in vast knowledge networks, and it is obvious that many of them are not up to the challenge.

Some managers are discovering that the process of purposeful play can inject much needed vitality into their organizations.

In an earlier life, as a marketing executive at a large lending institution, I was given the opportunity to join the company’s strategic leadership team. Because of some recent, significant organizational changes, we had many critical issues to confront.

The seeds of effective change must be planted by embedding procedural and behavioral changes in an organization long before the initiative is launched.

An executive’s “financial signature” is the key to how he or she evaluates risk and reward to build company value.

Employees with deep motivation, strong commitment, unquestioned loyalty and widely shared values can have drawbacks. Much has been written about the upside of deep commitment, but employers need to be wary of workers who identify too much with the company. Overidentification, says the author, may lead to an ends-justifies-the-means outlook, unethical actions, substitution of personal needs for company goals and resentment when the company doesn’t meet employees’ expectations.

Learning rarely follows a linear, upward progression. People forget what they once knew; institutional memory fades; obstacles of all kinds block individuals and groups from making progress. Sometimes an initially successful program or approach stops delivering results.

A company’s ability to execute today’s strategy while developing tomorrow’s arises from the context within which its employees operate.

When companies act dishonestly, the psychological costs outweigh any short-term gains. Dishonesty ultimately decreases repeat business and increases worker turnover and employee theft. Degradation of a company’s reputation, adverse effects on employee values and increased surveillance of workers through expensive new systems eat at an organization’s health. The authors offer proof that honesty is still the best policy.

Knowledge management is creating processes not just for learning and retaining what is important but also for avoiding or unlearning what is not.

Organizational responses to the increasingly varied composition of the workplace — including women; racial, ethnic or religious minorities; gays and lesbians — have engendered a complex mix of reactions.

Four types of organizational energy can either stimulate or handicap competitiveness. Companies are learning to identify and focus the kind best suited to their culture and goals.

For “knowledge-based” to be more than a buzzword, managers must recognize that the concept has little to do with the kind of products they sell. Whether it‘s a cement maker like Holcim or a financial services company like CapitalOne, a company‘s knowledge base is predicated on how it uses knowledge to change processes, overcome traditional boundaries, set strategy, and create a corporate culture.

People commonly talk about the energy (or lack thereof) associated with certain individuals or company initiatives. Managers can translate such talk into action that creates more energy, improves performance and fosters learning.

Organizations, like people, have essential natures defined by their formative experiences, their beliefs, their knowledge bases and their core competences. Attempts at change that are in conflict with this core identity are often doomed to failure. Managers can learn to recognize such conflicts and initiate identity change to make their companies more adaptive.

Why do motivated managers often fail to follow through? Because taking sustained action in the workplace requires more than motivation. It requires the deep commitment that comes from activating willpower.

Alert executives are learning to orchestrate the difficult transition from a product-innovation culture to a process-innovation culture that can transform successful startups into enduring industry leaders.

In this article, the authors make the case that corporate misdeeds are symptoms of a syndrome of selfishness that has taken hold of our business institutions, our societies and our minds. Drawing on history, literature, philosophy and management thinking, they argue that the syndrome is built on a series of half-truths — or fabrications — each of which has driven a debilitating wedge into society.