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.

After early successes in a very selective management-training program, Daniel Oliveira, a young manager for Brazilian fashion chain Clothes & Accessories, is thrown into the deep end of the pool by being reassigned to a region lagging in sales. Early on, Oliveira discovers that his store, located in mid-sized Vitória in southeastern Brazil, is in trouble. As soon as he tries to make changes, however, he meets with resistance from long-term employees. The case details his pitfalls and growing awareness of the complexities of leading a diverse workforce and managing change.

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.