Expectations are mental models that define how we and people around us want things to work out now, in the short- medium- and long-term. Whether expectations are aligned in an organization or not has an immediate impact on individual and organizational performance. In this blogpost we have a look at why expectation management is important and what you should consider in managing expectations effectively.
Year by year consultants and scholars around the world introduce hundreds if not thousands new management tools. One of those tools that has been already around for some years is organizational agility. In this blog post we explore the agility – performance relationship and ask whether striving for agility is worth it.
Evidence-based management (also known as EBM or EBMgt) is a management approach that involves using multiple sources of scientific evidence and empirical results as a means of attaining knowledge (Barends, Rousseau, & Briner, 2014). To be an evidence-based manager is to use the scientific literature as a means of answering questions, inspiring strategy decisions, and forming long-term plans. Published academic research from the fields of psychology, behavioral economics, communications, and even sociology can help to inform the decisions of a well-informed evidence-based manager. An evidence-based manager carefully considers the body of evidence, evaluating research for its quality and relevance.
Leadership is a phenomenon that has interested people for hundreds of years. One rather outdated explanatory approach still plays a prominent role in practice and the media in particular: The so-called Great Man Theory. In this blog we present what this theory is all about and why it is time to look for alternative approaches.
Niklas Luhmann, one of the most influential sociologists of the 20th century and father of social systems theory, once stated that organizations are made of decisions (Luhmann 2000). He even went further and argued that every decision taken builds on past decisions which accumulate to an organization’s future. On a more practical level, making the right decision can be a matter of life and death in high-risk environments such as aviation, medicine, or the military. In business, management and organizations, decision-making quality is a key determinant of good performance. We will take a look at the state of decision-making in the business sector and how Evidence-based Management can help managers, professionals and other stakeholders to improve decision-making quality.
Organizational agility is one of the key trends in almost all areas of management. Most of the available knowledge about when to apply an agile approach and how to apply it is related to product development. However, there is much more to organizational agility than the well-known product development tools such as SCRUM and Kanban. Especially in an environment characterized by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity (VUCA), an agile approach is your first choice. In this blog we provide you with a practical guide that helps you decide when an agile approach makes sense for your team, organization or project, as well as with tips on what you should consider when you want to apply such an approach.
Is the 21st century the downfall of the hierarchical organization? Taking into consideration current discussions about agility, delayering and network organizations one could think that the days of the hierarchical organization are numbered. We have a look behind those claims and come up with a set of arguments why hierarchies will remain one of the most important forms of organizing in the 21st century knowledge economy.
More and more organizations start to experiment with organizational forms beyond traditional hierarchies. Some of them are incredible successful while others cease to exist. In this blog post we have a look at what organizational design is, what are the novel organizational forms that emerge and whether they are actually that novel, with a set of questions with both academic and practical considerations that can be explored in the future.
Project teams are the new functional departments of modern organizations which come together to understand stakeholder needs and find solutions that delight them. It is virtually impossible to escape teams for professionals today which makes the question of managing them a key concern. Almost all employees working in and for organizations need to acquire the knowledge and learn the skills for building strong project teams, facilitate them through the stages of group formation thereby ensuring that synergistic efforts lead to higher performance. We provide you a comprehensive guide how to manage project teams to deliver high performance in this blog post.
When we speak informally about an individual’s personality, we may be referring to any number of qualities, from their temperament to their sense of humor, even the kind of media they like. However, in the social sciences, the study of personality focuses on enduring, reliable traits about a person that can be measured, and which are useful in predicting behavior (Saucier & Srivastra, 2015). The leading perspective on personality within the social sciences is the Five Factor Model, or the “Big Five”, which describes individuals in terms of their openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeability, extroversion, and neuroticism.
