Organizational Dynamics最新文献

Humor and leadership may seem like strange companions but the positive impact leaders' humor has on employees and work outcomes is no laughing matter! Humor is now being conceptualized as a leadership tool for leaders to strategically use to bring about desired employee outcomes. Yet the literature lacks suitable instructions on how to use humor as a leadership tool. This impedes humor training and development for leaders. We address this by delineating the Knowledge, Skills and Abilities needed to create and use strategic humor at work and including them in a humor toolkit specifically for leaders. Our paper also shows how to ensure the effective transfer of humor training to the workplace and the resultant leadership behaviours that arise due to the use of humor by leaders.

Micromanagement is a well-known phenomenon in the modern workplace. However, there’s a new subtype of micromanager: the motivational micromanager. This type of manager is showing up more and more in offices around the globe, and they can be as dangerous to innovation and team motivation as traditional micromanagers. The objective of this paper is to introduce the concept of the motivational micromanager, a leader who believes that when they give advice and detailed instructions, often with a smile and great enthusiasm, they are motivating their employees to succeed. Micromanagement is seen by many as even dangerous to organizational success and employees who work for motivational micromanagers are also at risk for burnout and quiet quitting because they, too, feel the strain of following detailed instructions, respecting a rigid regime, and avoiding mistakes at all costs. We discuss how motivational managers can shake free of the delusion that they are serving their employees. They need training and support to learn how to encourage others to come up with their own solutions, to create positive work cultures where innovation flows, to give and receive feedback without fear of retaliation, and to accept that mistakes are part of the learning process. The motivational micromanager borrows from two leadership constructs of empowerment and micromanagement. On the one side leaders wish to empower others with the best intentions and a motivational approach, on the other hand however the reality of the execution indicates a new sub-form of micromanagement. The distinctive contribution of this paper is to firstly label and uncover motivational micromanagement and raise awareness that this new species of managers exists and secondly to provide practical implications for MBA students, Executive Education programs and managers to move out of the micromanagement and into a truly empowering mode of leadership.

While the world is full of potential moonshot projects, there is an ever-growing disconnect between new ideas and their successful transformation into commercialized new products. Companies often struggle with inefficient resource allocation and the challenge of quickly assessing an idea’s feasibility. The burgeoning number of proof-of-concept (PoC) projects reflects the need to mitigate the risk of investing resources in potential failures. This study introduces the PoC Framework, a strategic tool that guides managers through the PoC journey, transforming initial ideas into real-world applications. Importantly, it promotes a mindset shift that equally values the proving and disproving of concepts. This approach saves resources by preventing the further development of non-viable ideas. The PoC Framework has been gaining traction among Silicon Valley firms, underscoring its practical relevance and effectiveness in fostering strategic thinking and overcoming hidden challenges within the PoC process.

Practitioners face a wealth of perspectives on leadership, each highlighting different dimensions to attend to as a leader. Contemporary literature, for instance, emphasizes aspects such as authenticity, vision, relationships, and being a servant leader. Regarding the process of becoming a leader, it suggests a path involving changing roles, rebuilding one’s identity, and becoming a quiet servant of one’s followers. However appropriate, these prescriptions often fail to address the misplaced expectations of practitioners, mostly lack of preparedness for people management, for its gritty realities and frustrations which sometimes resembles being dragged in the mud. This study proposes a framework whereby enactment of leadership necessitates adequate motivation and expectations. As leaders behave in patterns of cognitive, emotional, and appreciative perceptions, it proposes to approach leaders’ development as an issue of aesthetics, of taste development. The framework identifies different possible aesthetics of leadership, and suggests that the most operant aesthetic of leadership would taste less of grandiosity than of hardships.

Leaders are often celebrated for quick and decisive actions. Such actions include the ability to cut through the chaff and make rapid decisions in fast-paced environments. However, while decisiveness is admirable, poor decision-making is not. And an increasing amount of research informs us that leaders tend to be far too overconfident about their decision-making ability. First, this article details several ways that leaders’unconscious cognitive biases can cloud their decision-making ability. These biases such as attribution bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect, the planning fallacy, and jumping to faulty conclusions are particularly dangerous because everyone is infected by them—yet, because of the bias blind spot, leaders tend to naturally believe they are immune. Second, this article details ways that leaders can “mistake proof” their decision-making process. By exercising activities like pre-mortems, speed-accuracy tradeoffs, reference class forecasting, and improving reflective capacity, leaders can impose systems and methods to help protect their decision-making against their greatest potential nemesis—themselves.