Suchergebnisse

"Stop Wasting Precious Time and Money You have a complex problem at work, and you know the standard solutions: hire a consultant, enlist a superstar employee, have more meetings about it. In short, spend money and hours to dig your way out. But you've been down this road before-the so-called solution consumes your time, dollars, and resources, and yet the problem still reappears. There is a way out of this cycle. Organizational researchers Tanya Menon and Leigh Thompson, experts in collaboration and creativity, identify five spending traps that lead to this wasteful "action without traction": The Expertise Trap: recycling old solutions on current problems The Winner's Trap: investing additional resources into failing projects The Agreement Trap: avoiding conflict to feel like a team player The Communication Trap: communicating too frequently over too many channels The Macromanagement Trap: assuming your employees don't need your direction Menon and Thompson combine their own research with other findings in psychology to provide strategies to break these unproductive habits and refine your skills as a manager. From shaping problems in new ways and learning from failure through experimentation, to stimulating productive conflict and structuring coordinated conversations, you can escape these traps and discover the value hidden in your organization-without spending a dime"--

We propose that even-sized small groups often experience lower cohesion than odd-sized small groups. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate this effect within three- to six-person groups of freshman roommates and sibling groups, respectively. Study 3 replicates the basic even/odd effect among three- to five-person groups in a laboratory experiment that examines underlying mechanisms. To account for the even/odd effect, Study 3 focuses on the group's ability to provide members with certainty and identifies majority influence as the key instrument. We argue that groups struggle to provide certainty when they lack majorities (e.g., deadlocked coalitions) or contain unstable majorities (i.e., where small changes in opinion readily overturn existing power arrangements). Member uncertainty mediated the effects of coalition structure on cohesion. The results link structural variables (i.e., even/odd size and coalition structure) to psychological outcomes (i.e., member uncertainty and relational outcomes).

The contact hypothesis offers a tantalizing promise, suggesting that people of different races can build positive relationships through contact. The present research situates contact in its local social structure, showing how group size and racial composition shape contact. We analyze a natural experiment at Harvard University where incoming first-year students (freshmen) were randomly assigned to freshman roommates and months later chose their own second-year roommates. Interracial dyads within two-person groups and three-person groups without a white majority were as likely to dissolve as all-white dyads. However, interracial pairs disbanded more frequently when one East Asian lived with two whites. Using a context that is both experimental and naturalistic, the findings go beyond simple contact effects, showing how the local structure within which contact is situated determines its consequences.

We develop a dynamic cognitive model of network activation and show that people at different status levels spontaneously activate, or call to mind, different subsections of their networks when faced with job threat. Using a multimethod approach (General Social Survey data and a laboratory experiment), we find that, under conditions of job threat, people with low status exhibit a winnowing response (i.e., activating smaller and tighter subsections of their networks), whereas people with high status exhibit a widening response (i.e., activating larger and less constrained subsections of their networks). We integrate traditional network theories with cognitive psychology, suggesting that cognitively activating social networks is a precondition to mobilizing them. One implication is that narrowing the network in response to threat might reduce low-status group members' access to new information, harming their chances of finding subsequent employment and exacerbating social inequality.