We envision a “smart” online discovery tool which helps users discover relevant information they did not even know existed-let alone how to find-which enables them to “learn things they didn’t know they didn’t know.” This highly interdisciplinary reference resource reviews and summarizes knowledge about key social and behavioral science topics and outlines emerging trends in specific fields. Moreover, by using hyperlinks, it dynamically directs users to other articles that bear directly on a topic of interest. The hyperlinks will create an intelligent multidimensional system of cross-referencing, leading users to consider a topic from multiple levels of analysis and from different disciplinary perspectives they may not have considered. Articles will be forward-looking in that each will only briefly review and summarize the current state of knowledge on a given topic, then focus on mapping emerging trends and identifying promising new lines of research. This new resource is especially timely given that increasing “spamming” and “gaming” of the Internet has led search engines such as Google to become increasingly less effective. This reference work will allow users to search efficiently and effectively within the social and behavioral sciences while promoting interdisciplinary understanding of individual topics.

Written for both the seasoned professional and the student who wants to deepen their understanding of the processes involved in conflicts and their knowledge of how to manage them constructively, this book provides an understanding for managing conflicts at all levels—interpersonal, intergroup, organizational, and international. Each chapter focuses around a central case or illustration of the practice with a discussion for both training and direct intervention.  This new edition includes companion downloadable chapters and new information on conflict resolution and IT, social networks, schools, families, environment and much more.

Gain inside insight to help team leaders and team members maximize their success in business. 

Making the Team: A Guide for Managers  combines cutting-edge theory with the latest research and real-world applications in order to help team leaders and team members succeed in the business world. 

Every chapter of the fourth edition contains new information, new research, updated examples, and more.

This study re-examines organizational learning theories to reconcile the conditions under which prior experience leads to performance gains. Using the context of multinational corporations’ (MNCs’) heterogeneous host country institutional experiences, and using field studies on telecommunications regulation, executive interviews (conducted in Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Canada, and the U.S.), and a foreign direct investment dataset, I develop an experiential-learning theoretical framework to explain the mechanisms driving MNCs’ performance in subsequent host country institutional environments. Prior experience is operationalized as the knowledge acquired in 80 heterogeneous regulatory environments and a distance calculation is used to compute firm-level distance measures for 96 subunit operations investing in the Brazilian telecommunications industry from 1997 to 2004. I predict that MNCs with highly similar institutional experience compared with the target country’s institutional environment will succeed. Empirical evidence suggests that similarity, breadth, and depth of prior regulatory experience significantly prolong survival. In contrast, firms with institutional experience unrelated to the target country’s regulatory environment experience learning penalties and are six times more likely to fail. These findings suggest that variations in learning contexts affect organizations’ learning curves.

Novelty is an essential feature of creative ideas, yet the building blocks of new ideas are often embodied in existing knowledge. From this perspective, balancing atypical knowledge with conventional knowledge may be critical to the link between innovativeness and impact. Our analysis of 17.9 million papers spanning all scientific fields suggests that science follows a nearly universal pattern: The highest-impact science is primarily grounded in exceptionally conventional combinations of prior work yet simultaneously features an intrusion of unusual combinations. Papers of this type were twice as likely to be highly cited works. Novel combinations of prior work are rare, yet teams are 37.7% more likely than solo authors to insert novel combinations into familiar knowledge domains.

This study applies factor analytic techniques to 131 telecommunications regulatory agencies in 80 countries to develop a comparative framework for better understanding the cross-national institutional variation in industrial regulation. While some of these measures are specific to the telecom industry (i.e., WTO Basic Telecom Agreement participation), most of these regulatory variables can be applied to other regulated industries. After analyzing thirty variables, these techniques identify and quantify six distinct dimensions of industry regulation, namely, the competitive market structure rules, industry standards rules, entry barrier rules, institutional stability, political appointment process and the regulatory governance structure. Despite the conventional wisdom that suggests the rules of the game are key to industry regulation, this study finds that the single largest source of cross-national variation is the level of regulatory institutional stability (accounting for 16% of the total variation in cross-national industry regulation). This suggests that more focus and attention should be given to the role formal institutions play in industry regulation. This study also finds differences in industry regulation between developed, developing, and least-developed nations. Developed countries on average have significantly higher regulation with the U.S being the highest. This suggests that regulation is a critical component of industrial regimes and the competitiveness of developed economies.

Media Coverage:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/08/23/214819449/to-reduce-prejudice-try-sharing-passions-and-cultures

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/august/prejudice-cultural-activity-082213.html

National leaders have the ultimate responsibility to balance the needs of a diverse set of constituents in society while using their country’s unique set of resources to grow the economy and to gain comparative advantages. Diversity is known to be an extremely challenging factor to reconcile nationally and is negatively associated with GDP growth—in fact, high levels of ethnic diversity are associated with a 2 percent decline in GDP growth. In most countries throughout modern history, the role of the national leader has been played by men. Women historically have had limited opportunities to lead their countries and in many early cases, only by the failing of their husband’s health, or death, do they ascend to power. However, in the last decade, more women have been elected to lead their countries such as Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in the post-war torn Republic of Liberia, Angela Merkel who entered politics after the reunification of the Federal Republic of Germany, and most recently, Park Geun-hye in the Republic of Korea under the political platform of harmonious unification with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. With the rise in female national leaders, it begs the question of whether there are some conditions in which women might be more effective leaders than their male counterparts. This study examines the intersection of ethnic diversity, gender and leadership to explore the effectiveness of male versus female leadership in highly diverse societies, as compared to those that are ethnically more homogeneous. We examine a unique dataset of 5,709 observations of national leaders in 139 nations over more than five decades. We find that in more ethnically diverse nations, the presence of a female national leader is correlated with a 6.9 percent increase in GDP growth in comparison to having a male leader. We offer some plausible rationale for these patterns and discuss the policy implications of our findings.

The widely accepted conventional viewpoint of Jensen and Meckling (1976) suggests that large listed firms have diffuse shareholders and no controlling owner. However, recent research shows that large corporate sectors of many economies outside the U.S. and U.K. are dominated by pyramidal corporate groups, not widely held firms. Thus, corporate governance behaviors and agency issues in the context of the pyramid take on new meaning. These pyramidal structures have entrenched controlling insiders who impose exacerbated agency problems to under-informed outside investors, particularly joint venture partners from host countries dominated by widely held firms. The controlling insiders are thought to divert resources between companies they control to advance their private agendas of wealth or utility maximization and not the joint venture. We identify the differences in the agency problems in widely held stand alone firms versus pyramidal firms and expose the pitfalls of joint venturing with firms belonging to pyramidal groups. We show that joint ventures between multinationals based in countries where pyramiding is rare and pyramidal group member companies have significantly elevated failure rates. We infer that this reflects the multinationals’ unfamiliarity with the expropriation risks associated with pyramidal groups. Conversely, joint ventures among pyramidal groups are more likely to succeed. We present clinical examples that illustrate the mechanisms that drive such divergent performance in joint venture partnerships. While our results are based on a single industry in a single country, we believe the concerns are general.

Think of your to-do list at work. Chances are the most important tasks require you to work with others—and the success of those endeavors depends on the effectiveness of your collaboration.

According to management expert Leigh Thompson, collaboration that is conscious, planned, and focused on generating new ideas builds excitement and produces what she calls a “creative conspiracy.” Teams that conspire to organize themselves, motivate one another, and combine their talents to meet creative challenges are the hallmark of the most successful organizations.

In this book, Thompson reveals the keys to the kind of collaboration that allows teams to reach their full creative potential and maximize their results. She also reveals a host of surprising findings; for example:

• Left to their own devices, teams are less creative than individuals
• Providing “rules” to teams actually increases inventiveness
• Striving for quality results in less creativity than striving for quantity
• Fluctuating membership enhances a team’s innovation
• Most leaders cannot articulate the four basic rules of brainstorming


Thompson combines broad-ranging research with real-life examples to offer strategies and practices designed to help teams and their leaders capitalize on what actually works when it comes to creative collaboration. Creative Conspiracy challenges managers to adopt an unconventional approach to leading teams that, done right, will lead to the creative success of every team—and every organization.

Learn to be a world-class negotiator: get what you want and need out of any negotiation! Here, top negotiations expert Leigh Thompson brings together 50+ proven negotiation principles and bite-size, easy-to-use techniques that work! Now fully updated, this edition contains brand-new “truths” for negotiating successfully across generations and cultures, negotiating in virtual environments, and more. Thompson provides realistic game plans that work in any negotiation situation and shows how to create win-win deals by leveraging carefully collected information.  Thompson also helps you effectively lay claim to part of the win-win goldmine, and more. You’ll learn how to handle less-than-perfect situations, such as getting called on a bluff, establishing trust with someone you don’t trust, recognizing when to walk away, negotiating with people you don’t like — and conversely, negotiating with people you love. Thompson guides you every step of the way, helping you plan strategy, understand your “best alternative to a negotiated agreement,” make the first offer, control the process (and your emotions), resolve difficult disputes, and achieve the goals that matter most.

Two studies utilized firsthand accounts from survivors of two major natural disasters—Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Chilean earthquake in 2010—to investigate (1) how people make sense of their disaster experiences and (2) who understands these events in religious terms. We found that describing the disasters as an act of God was among the most common explanations. Moreover, the degree to which survivors encountered extreme hardship—unpredictable, disruptive, and uncontrollable experiences—predicted explanations of the events as an act of God. These findings held even after controlling for demographic factors (educational attainment and race/ethnicity) known to be associated with religiosity. Notably, objective experiences (e.g., seeing dead bodies) were better predictors of religious meaning-making than relatively subjective psychological reactions to those experiences (e.g., fear). These studies extend the literature by examining how experiences of hardship in real-world contexts underlie religious meaning-making and suggest that religiosity emerges, in part, from variation in individual experience.

American universities increasingly admit first-generation students—students whose parents do not have four-year degrees. Once admitted, these students experience greater challenges adjusting to universities compared to continuing-generation students—students who have at least one parent with a four-year degree. This additional adversity is typically explained in terms of first-generation students' relative lack of economic (e.g., money) or academic (e.g., preparation) resources. We propose that this adversity also stems from a cultural mismatch between the mostly middle-class, independent norms institutionalized in American universities and the relatively interdependent norms that first-generation students are socialized with in working-class contexts before college. As predicted, an experiment revealed that framing the university culture in terms of independent norms (cultural mismatch) led first-generation students to show greater increases in cortisol and less positive/more negative emotions than continuing-generation students while giving a speech. However, reframing the university culture to include interdependent norms (cultural match) eliminated this gap.

Despite the popularity of diversity management, there is little consensus on how to design diversity practices that work. In this article, the author provides an inside look into one type of diversity practice: diversity recruitment. Drawing on qualitative evidence from hiring in elite law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms, the author analyzes what diversity recruitment looks like in these firms in theory and in practice. The author finds that although these firms tend to have the ingredients for success on paper, in practice the presence of structural and status divides between those responsible for overseeing diversity recruitment and those making hiring decisions, alongside widespread cultural beliefs among decision-makers that diversity is not a valid criterion of evaluation, stymies firms’ efforts to diversify. The author’s findings highlight that to be successful in translating diversity programs into results, those charged with overseeing diversity programs need not only formal organizational authority but also sufficient informal power and status to wield influence.

This case describes a newly promoted middle manager in a global, multi-cultural organization who is challenged by a number of factors in the workplace which are impacting her and her team’s ability to perform to the expectations of her regional manager. While it would be easy to blame the new manager, deeper analysis in fact reveals that many forces are at work here in addition to her inexperience including communication of strategy and performance objectives, mismanaged team members, cultural inconsistencies, and a lack of leadership direction and/or skill from the very top to her supervising manager.

This article presents culture as a vehicle of labor market sorting. Providing a case study of hiring in elite professional service firms, I investigate the often-suggested but heretofore empirically unexamined hypothesis that cultural similarities between employers and job candidates matter for employers’ hiring decisions. Drawing from 120 interviews with employers and participant observation of a hiring committee, I argue that hiring is more than just a process of skills sorting; it is also a process of cultural matching between candidates, evaluators, and firms. Employers sought candidates who were not only competent but also culturally similar to themselves in terms of leisure pursuits, experiences, and self-presentation styles. Concerns about shared culture were highly salient to employers and often outweighed concerns about productivity alone. I unpack the interpersonal processes through which cultural similarities affected candidate evaluation in elite firms and provide the first empirical demonstration that shared culture—particularly in the form of lifestyle markers—matters for employer hiring. I conclude by discussing the implications of my findings for scholarship on culture, inequality, and labor markets.

Metacognition is cognition about cognition, thinking about thinking, knowing about knowing, and feeling about thinking (Alter & Oppenheimer, 2009; Petty, Brinol, Tormala, & Wegener, 2007; Schwarz, Sanna, Skurnik, & Yoon, 2007). In the case of teams and groups, metacognition is team members thinking about how their team processes information, works on problems, and feels about the team process (Hinsz, 2004; Hinsz, Tindale, & Vollrath, 1997). Similarly, the the case of organizations, metacognition is members of organizations thinking about how their organization functions and feels about the way their organization functions. We use the distinction between primary and secondary cognition to guide out review (Petty et al., 2007). Primary thoughts are those that occur at a direct level of cognition and involve people's initial associations. Following a primary thought, people can also generate secondary thoughts (i.e., metacognitions) that occur as reflections on the first-level thoughts or the processes that generated the primary thoughts. In their review, we focus on people's cognitions and feelings about groups, teams, and their organizations. We situate our review with regard to people as they interact with and work in teams and business organizations, as opposed to people cognizing about crowds or aggregates with whom they have no social or organizational relationship. Unfortunately, literature search using the phrases "metacognition and organizations," "metacognitions and teams," and "metacognition and groups" yielded very little (see Hinsz, 2004, for an exception). Yet, organizational behavior (OB) researchers resonate to the idea that managers, leaders, and their teams contemplate their thinking, behavior, and each other. Our thesis is that metacognition is alive and well in OB; it simply operates under a variety of banners (including transactive memory, shared mental models, group reflexivity, and so on) that paradoxically do not recognize one another. Throughout our review, we explore the following questions: Does metacognition help or hurt teams? Do metacognitive processes naturally emerge and develop or are they something that can be taught, leveraged, and trained?

Human beings have an unusual proclivity for altruistic behavior, and recent commentators have suggested that these prosocial tendencies arise from our unique capacity to understand the minds of others (i.e., to mentalize). The current studies test this hypothesis by examining the relation between altruistic behavior and the reflexive engagement of a neural system reliably associated with mentalizing. Results indicated that activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex—a region consistently involved in understanding others’ mental states—predicts both monetary donations to others and time spent helping others. These findings address long-standing questions about the proximate source of human altruism by suggesting that prosocial behavior results, in part, from our broader tendency for social-cognitive thought.