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WHARTON CENTER FOR
LEADERSHIP AND CHANGE MANAGEMENT
Current and
Past Research Projects
Alliance Formation Through Inter-Firm Networks:
Lori Rosenkopf (2004) investigated the relative role
that top executives and mid-level managers played in the formation of alliances
among firms in the cellular industry.
Board Rank: Martin J.
Conyon and Mark Muldoon studied (2004) the centrality and structural influence
of corporate boards of directors in the U.S. and U.K. by drawing upon an
algorithm developed by a web search engine. The centrality of a board
within the network of company directors facilitates the diffusion of
information, rumors, and innovation among companies -- and may be correlated
with superior governance and leadership.
Board Structure Across Countries: Mauro F.
Guillén and doctoral student William Schneper investigated the determinants of
national variations in governing board size, fraction of board seats held by
outsiders, and separation of the roles of chief executive and board chair.
Among the determinants examined were national differences in the primary
functions of the board and the relative power of investors, executives, labor,
and the public.
Cascading Leadership:
Katherine Klein and Ph.D. student Alex Leeds (2007) examined how
leadership-by-example functions in medical teams and teams in the services
industries. They asked whether effective leader behavior remains
effective when emulated wholesale by followers. In particular, they
studied how leaders’ approaches, including expressions of enthusiasm and
rational problem solving tactics, functioned once they had been widely
adopted by other members of their teams.
Change Leadership:
John Paul MacDuffie, Daniel Raff, Jitendra Singh, and several MBA
students conducted case studies of three organizations that are undergoing
exemplary change and restructuring initiatives.
Chinese Governance: Michael Useem and Neng Liang
(2007) of the China Europe International Business School initiated a project on
the transformation of governing boards of Chinese companies as they enter the
global economy.
Collaboration Across Borders:
Martine Haas (2008) examined
collaboration efforts across geographic borders and business disciplines at
a large multinational firm, with a view to developing insight into when such
efforts succeed or fail. The project focused on the challenges of achieving
the promise of integrating ideas, know-how, and talent that resides in
different parts of the company when employees had to work across
organizational boundaries.
Continuous
Organizational Change:
Karen Jehn and Ph.D. student Alex Michel examined the process of
organizational change in an international software firm, focusing on employee
cognitions and their impact on a firm’s ability to engage in continuous change.
Corporate Governance and Cross-Border Acquisitions:
Mauro F. Guillén and doctoral student (2005) William
D. Schneper examined the predictors of company acquisitions across national
borders from 1990 to 2003, including governance practices, cultural differences,
investor protections, and international relations. They theorized, for example,
that countries with stronger shareholder rights might seek to acquire firms from
countries with weaker shareholder protection in an effort to improve the
corporate governance and, thus, the financial and operational performance of the
target organization. Their study carries implications for company leaders
when evaluating the costs and benefits of cross-border acquisitions and related
transactions.
Emerging Multinationals from Emerging Markets:
Jitendra Singh and Northeastern University faculty member Ravi Ramamurti
organized a conference in mid-2007 on newly internationalizing firms. The
central questions included: 1) In which industries have local firms
emerged as multinational competitors, and why? Conversely, in which
industries have firms tried to internationalize but failed? 2) How did the
successful firms overcome the handicaps of being late internationalizers? 3)
What types of competitive advantages do these firms enjoy, and why, i.e. how are
those advantages shaped by the national and international context (economic,
political, institutional, and social)? 4) How sustainable are their competitive
advantages? Are the firms likely to be acquired by firms from
developed countries or are they likely to remain independent players, and why?
5) Through what strategies have they built their international presence? Which
countries have they targeted (rich, poor, or both), how rapidly have they
internationalized, and what modes of entry have they used, and why? 6). How is
rise of these multinationals changing competitive dynamics in their respective
industries? How are firms from developed countries responding to the
opportunities and challenges?
Employees on Boards:
Chip Hunter and doctoral student David Hess examined the conditions
under which union- and employee-nominated directors are effective in
representing the interests of their constituencies, or, conversely, the
interests of investors – or both.
Emotional Culture in Organizations:
Sigal Barsade (2008)
studied how affective culture is
a critical component in understanding organizational culture, and she examined
how an affective culture of love and care can influence employee outcomes and
the customers they serve.
Executive Careers:
Stephanie Wilk worked with
several undergraduates and a doctoral student to investigate changes in the
career opportunities facing executives and their mobility among jobs and
companies in the U.S. and Europe.
Executive
Succession: Constance Helfat
and several students identified whether external CEO successors are more
successful than internal successors, and which of their background experiences
make for the difference.
External versus
Internal Leadership Development: Matthew Bidwell and J. R. Keller
(2010) explore the differences between external hiring and internal development
as means of acquiring human capital. We draw on personnel data from a number of
firms to compare the determinants and consequences of these two strategies. When
are firms more likely to hire workers to fill positions? When is internal
mobility more likely to be used? And what are subsequent outcomes for the
firm, in terms of pay, performance and mobility?
A
Field Study of Indian and Chinese Business Leadership:
Jitendra Singh and Nandani Lynton (CEIBS, Shanghai, China) are studying
(2010) the landscape of Indian and Chinese business leadership. While it is
widely acknowledged that leader behavior is different from the US in these
two economically important countries, less is known about the contours of
some of those differences, as seen through the eyes of Indian and Chinese
leaders and evident in their behaviors. This exploratory study uses a
direct, structured interview approach with senior leaders in Indian and
Chinese firms to uncover distinctive leadership patterns in these two
countries.
Framing the Future: Sarah
Kaplan studied (2005) with MIT's Wanda Orlikowski how managers at a
communications technology company interpreted changing technologies and market
conditions, and how that affected their strategic response to technical change
in the industry. They focused on a period of rapid change when the
managers were faced with confusing data, competing technologies, unclear market
needs, competitive threats and doubts about technological viability.
Gender
Composition of Boards: Evidence from A Natural
Experiment: A research project by Iwan Barankay, Ingeborg
Solli of University of Stavanger, and Mike Waterson of University of Warwick
(2009). As from 1 January 2008, all public limited Norwegian companies
have been required to have a minimum of 40% women on their company boards.
This has involved a huge increase in female board members, up from 9% in 2004
(when plans were announced) to 36% in early 2008, a net increase of 476 women,
438 of them Norwegian. In sum, an unprecedented change in gender
composition has taken place. From an economics research viewpoint, this
policy move has the form of a natural experiment, enabling some unusual insights
into the working and impact of company boards. It is seldom possible to evaluate
board impact because the alternative foregone is unclear, here it is clear.
From a policy perspective, if the experiment is successful, the implications for
company boards worldwide are immense. The objective of this project is to
measure and evaluate the implications of this major policy change.
Getting Things
Done Through Hierarchical Shortcuts: A Case of the Russian Corporate
Bureaucracy:
Valery Yakubovich explores (2009) decision-making and career
implications of employees’ “hierarchical shortcuts,” informal vertical
relationships that operate within the firm’s chain of command but bypass
adjacent levels of the formal hierarchy. Using unique data on careers and work
relationships of employees in a large Russian energy company, he assesses the
prevalence of such shortcuts and their impact on employees’ pay, promotion, and
retention, in particular, at the outset of the economic crisis that started in
the Fall of 2008.
Global Leadership:
Robert House investigated which leadership capabilities are universally
emphasized across industries and cultures, and which are relatively unique to
specific sectors and countries.
Governance of Public Pension Funds:
Michael Useem and Ph.D. student David Hess studied the governance of
public pension funds and the impact of governance on their financial
performance.
Guiding Teams: Chris Maxwell (2006) interviewed ten world-class mountain guides
to determine how they lead teams of less experienced climbers in challenging
environments, and outlined the implications for business team leaders.
Hostile
Takeovers:
Mauro F. Guillén and Ph.D.
student William Schneper
examined
the effects of regulative, normative, and cognitive institutions on the
frequency of hostile takeovers in 59 countries over an eleven year time period.
Indian Corporate Leadership, Governance,
and Human Resource Management: Peter Cappelli, Harbir Singh, Jitendra
Singh, and Michael Useem (2007), with additional support from India's
National Human Resource Development Network, Wharton's Mack Center for
Technological Innovation, Wharton's Center for Human Resources, and Wharton
Executive Education, initiated a long-term research project on leadership,
governance, and human resource management among large publicly-traded Indian
companies.
Intellectual Leadership in the
Sciences and Social Sciences: Lori
Rosenkopf and doctoral student Phin Upham
investigated (2006) intellectual leadership in science
and social science. They focused on a
powerful form of intellectual leadership that resides
in paradigms – or frameworks for looking at the world – that
under-grid scientific and technical knowledge
communities.
International Strategies of e-Commerce v. Bricks & Mortar companies:
Jeffrey H. Dyer examined the international strategies – including the
international experience of the head of international operations – of e-commerce
firms and their "clicks and mortar" competitors to identify the factors,
including leadership, most predictive of international success.
Knowledge Spillovers: Evan Rawley and Jason Snyder (2008) studied how
physician relocation influences knowledge spillovers between liver transplant
centers. The project builds on the learning-by-doing and knowledge
spillovers literatures using procedure volume as a proxy for knowledge stock and
physician relocation to capture knowledge flows across transplant centers.
That anticipate that residents acquire knowledge when they learn cutting-edge
life-saving techniques assisting senior physicians and then transfer this
knowledge to other transplantation centers when they relocate to become
attending physicians.
Lateral Leadership
in Outsourcing Organizations:
Joseph Harder and Michael Useem analyzed the changes in leadership styles in the
wake of company decisions to outsource significant components of their
operations.
Leader Emotion and Follower Motivation: Nancy
Rothbard and Sigal Barsade examined (2004) the
question of whether positive or negative emotions of a leader are more effective
in motivating team performance. What happens when a leader displays
irritation and anger, or, conversely, offers praise and encouragement?
Prior research shows that when individuals experience positive emotions in the
workplace, they become more creative, cooperative, and engaged. Yet other
research shows that performance can sometimes also be improved when they
experience controlled anger from above. Both emotional styles may work for
leaders, and to understand why and how, the researchers studied a set of teams
whose leaders employed both styles.
Leadership and Boards Across Countries:
Mauro F. Guillén and Ph.D. student William Schneper examined the impact of equity
shareholder concentration, the level of labor force unionization, whether
various stakeholder groups have gained major political party representation,
commercial banking concentration, and the extent to which a national culture
upholds individualistic versus communitarian values on 1) corporate leadership,
specifically executive turnover rates and their functional and educational
backgrounds, and 2) board structure, specifically stakeholder representation on
boards of directors and average board tenure.
Leadership and Capabilities: Joydeep
Chatterjee (2008) examined how senior leadership
enables capability development, and its impact on firm performance, with a focus
on the global software services industry.
Leadership in Emerging Market Public R&D Entities:
Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury (2010) studies the incentives that drive
bureaucrats and scientists running public R&D entities in India. The project
is also focused on understanding how government owned R&D entities balance
priorities among performing basic research and commercializing technologies.
Though public R&D labs and state owned entities in general form a large
component of innovative output in the U.S. and around the world, very little
is known on the incentives that drive bureaucrats and senior scientists
running these entities. On one hand, they are expected to contribute to
basic research accessible through publications. On the other hand, there are
pressures to generate revenue by commercializing research. This research
project seeks to understand the incentives that led the leadership of 42
state owned labs in India to move towards more commercially viable projects
starting 1994. It uses data from government circulars, annual reports and
speeches made by the lab leadership in the period 1985-2004.
Leadership Opportunities in Technology Standards-Setting
Organizations: Lori Rosenkopf (2010) and doctoral student Ram Ranganathan
study how firms create and avail themselves of leadership opportunities in
technology standards-setting organizations. They investigate the
decision-making process within these cooperative bodies where firms’
representatives arbitrate technological differences and adjudicate amongst
alternatives. They examine how some firms control the pace and the direction of
change by assuming leadership positions within standards committees, by voting
to delay change and by shaping and appropriating technological change outcomes
through disclosure and tailoring of patents. Their study thus highlights
important and novel ways in which firms lead, manage and control change to their
advantage in technologically uncertain environments.
Leadership Research: In collaboration with
INSEAD, Katherine Klein, Michael Useem, and doctoral students Andy Cohen
and Alex Leeds organized a conference in June, 2008 to take stock of what we
know about leadership from academic research and where that research should be
going. The conference conceived of leadership research to include work in
the areas of firm strategy, top management teams, corporate governance, company
culture, and leader behaviors, characteristics, and relationships with
followers. Though much of the work in these areas does not explicitly
conceptualize these issues as questions of leadership, they have much to say
about company leadership in that they all reference those whose views and
decisions are decisive in shaping company direction, company strategy, and
employee behavior.
Leading Team
Conflict: Karen Jehn and Anne
Cummings evaluated the role of team leadership in the constructive use of
conflict for creativity and change.
Leading
Team Development and Performance:
Katherine Klein and PhD
student Andrew Knight studied (2006) the role of formal leaders in guiding
team learning and team performance in short-term project teams. They used
longitudinal data from team leaders and team members preparing to compete in
a West Point military competition to understand how leaders shape team
developmental trajectories and how team developmental trajectories relate to
team performance.
Leading Up:
Michael Useem prepared a book on how managers can effectively lead their
boss, board, and investors when leadership is not coming from above.
Leadership
Challenges in Higher Education:
John Kimberly and doctoral student Elizabeth Craig evaluated the challenges that
top college and university administrators are facing and the implications for
the skills they will need for leadership and change.
Leadership 101: Documentary producer David
Stone developed a possible five-part television series on the leadership lessons
for business from the Wharton Leadership Ventures, including a program with the
U.S. Marine Corps, trek to Mt. Everest, and walk of the Civil War battlefield at
Gettysburg.
Loneliness at the Top:
Sigal Barsade (2008) studied
the antecedents and consequences of loneliness at work. Is
it really lonelier at the top, and if so, why?
National Governance Systems,
Stakeholder Power, and Post-Acquisition Dynamics:
Laurence Capron (INSEAD) and Mauro
Guillen sought to assess
(2006) the extent to which post-acquisition dynamics
are driven by the power of organizational stakeholders. They examined whether
downsizing of the target company, resource transfers from the acquirer, and
enhanced performance of the target are more likely to occur when the new owners
can exert more power than the old owners, and when the target’s employees are
less powerful. They also examined whether experienced acquirers are able to
overcome the likely resistance of powerful employees more easily. Using survey
responses from 190 North American and European acquirers of as many as 253
targets located in 27 different countries, they obtained preliminary findings
indicating stakeholder rights and experience do exert an effect on some
post-acquisition dynamics and outcomes. They highlight the crucial role that
power plays in the pursuit of value creation in the wake of corporate
acquisitions, noting that both owners and employees have at their disposal tools
to advance their interests.
New
Institutions, Old Networks, and Increasing Turbulence: The Evolution of
Corporate Governance in
South America in the Age of Globalization: Gerald
A. McDermott analyzed (2006) the evolution of corporate boards in
South America, especially Argentina, in face of wholesale reforms of market
liberalization and volatile growth from 1995 to 2005. The principle
empirical questions guiding this research were twofold: 1) How do the forces
of regulatory institutions, industry isomorphism, and social networks
interact to re shape corporate boards? 2) What types of strategies do
managers and investors use to maintain corporate control if the face of
economic volatility and wholesale market liberalization? The research
draws on a unique data set constructed of board membership and inter-locking
ownership of the largest 130 firms in Argentina, and the data will be
compared with similar data from Chile and Brazil.
Organizational Behavioral Conference:
Jennifer Mueller and Nancy Rothbard organized (2006-07) the annual
organizational behavior mini-conference,
a forum for junior faculty to present thought-provoking new research on
organizational behavior and change. A diverse group of scholars from
top research institutions presented their work on topics such as identity,
emotions, diversity, knowledge transfer, creativity, and team performance.
Organizational Leaders Become Inter-Organizational
Leaders: Mauro F. Guillén and Ph.D. student William Schneper studied
predictors of when and with whom general managers in Major League Baseball trade
players with other teams. They anticipated that the general managers’
career, contacts, and image affected their trading: those with good
communication networks and reputations for trustworthiness were more likely to
become preferred trading partners.
Personal Networks and Managerial Success: Emilio
Castilla identified (2005) the personal experiences, career paths, and network
contacts within a multinational company that produce higher job satisfaction,
stronger commitment to the firm, greater work performance, faster advancement in
the enterprise, and better leadership capacities. He focused on the impact
of managers' experiences and networks both within and outside the company, and
compared their impact across three national settings where the firm operated.
Physical Health and Total Leadership: Stewart
Friedman worked with Debbie Hufnagel to create teaching materials for fostering
better health through physical activity and proper nutrition as part of one's
"total leadership."
Research on Organizational Behavior: Nancy
Rothbard organized the annual Wharton "OB Mini-Conference" for young scholars to
present their research on organizational change and a range of related issues.
Resilience and Failure: Alexander Leeds (2008)
studied resilience and failure among inexperienced leaders.
Risk vs. Incentives:
Julie Wulf
evaluated (2005) the trade-offs between
risk and incentives
-- since risk-averse managers
require additional compensation to offset risk, it is more costly for firms
operating in riskier environments to offer incentive pay to managers
-- among division managers. The study also examined the impact of
measures of authority and monitoring costs, including
physical
proximity of divisions to headquarters and product proximity of divisions to
the firm’s core business.
Is Silence
Golden? The Attributions of Silence and its Influence on Negotiations:
A part of the role of a leader involves negotiations with both internal
and external stake-holders. Sigal Barsade focused (2006) on a rarely studied
part of this leadership role, the use and effectiveness of silence in the
negotiation process. Silence has many functions, from a way to communicate
affective and cognitive information to a mechanism for shaping interpersonal
connections. In the context of negotiations, while negotiators
resonate to the idea of using silence to great effect, there is almost no
systematic empirical research that has been conducted about the attributions
that are made about silence and the emotional, attitudinal, and behavioral
outcomes of silence. For example, do people tend to perceive silence as a
signal of disagreement or a time-out for thinking about different solutions
-- or both and more? Is silence beneficial or detrimental for the silent
party? What are the boundary conditions, for example, differential power
between the two negotiating parties, which determine the different
meanings of silence? The research project aimed to both understand the
varying attributions that can be made about silence; to develop scales
measuring these attributions; and to examine the behavioral, attitudinal,
and emotional outcomes of silence. She did so through a set of
critical incident retrospective studies of workplace negotiations, as well
as laboratory studies in which participants negotiate with each other in a
way that the use of silence is intentionally created, observed and its
effects on negotiation outcomes analyzed.
Sovereign Wealth Funds: Mauro F.
Guillén (2008) studied the
rise of sovereign wealth funds, focusing on their causes, investments, and
consequences.
Strategic Change, Dynamic
Capabilities of the Firm, and CEO Career Paths:
Anuja Gupta and Sidney Winter (2007) studied
CEO career patterns and the relationship of their careers to
the degree of change in the industries in which the CEOs served.
Strategy and Leadership in China:
Marshall Meyer examined Procter and Gamble’s entry into China, with a
focus on how its leadership established connections, built a distribution
system, and transferred practices from elsewhere in Asia. More
recently (2007) he has been working on a survey of Chinese company leaders
conducted by the China Entrepreneur Survey System.
Strategy-Making in a Crisis: Sarah Kaplan and MIT
Sloan School's Rebecca
Henderson and Wanda Orlikowski examined (2006-)
strategy-making in real time through the analysis of the
private monthly letters a CEO wrote to his company’s board of directors
during a major industry crisis. These letters contain both the CEO’s
evolving assessment of the market as well as contemporary plans for
responding to the situation. The analysis included in-depth
discourse-based interviews with the CEO. These data provided a perspective
on how a manager made sense of a changing environment and made choices about
what strategic direction to take. This research contributed to the
literature on understanding firm response to change and more specifically to
an understanding of how managers' specific choices and actions shape these
responses.
Strategy Renewal:
Gabriel Szulanski and a group of MBA students developed a depth study of
one company’s leadership, staffing, and timing in the renewal of its strategic
planning and strategy making.
Task Engagement, Positive and Negative
Feedback, and Self Affirmations:
Nancy Rothbard studied (2006) leadership feedback. An important part
of a leader’s job is to give feedback – to immediate subordinates, and in
some ways to the organization as a whole. Receiving positive or negative
performance feedback from a supervisor, or cautionary advice or praise from
co-workers is commonplace in organizations. Such feedback is considered to
be an important motivational tool or pitfall that leaders face as they try
to navigate the difficulties involved in effectively motivating employees to
engage in their work. Feedback is a challenging management tool
because it often invokes a person’s sense of self. Indeed, among other
things, positive and negative feedback can serve to either affirm one’s self
concept or threaten it. Yet, there is a dearth of research looking at
how satisfying people’s need to affirm the self influences their subsequent
performance and level of engagement in future tasks. Would negative feedback
lead individuals to disengage from a subsequent task or would it lead them
to compensate by becoming more engaged in that subsequent task? Likewise,
would positive feedback be a springboard to increased engagement, leading
people to be better performers on subsequent tasks, or would providing such
positive self-affirmation serve as a soother, leading to contentedness and a
lack of engagement and productivity in future tasks? This study sought
to understanding the role of feedback as a springboard for increased
engagement or a sop for further engagement as such it has important
leadership implications. Because people have a hard time hearing
negative feedback, leaders may be inclined to soften the message by
providing affirmations to the employee regarding other unrelated aspects of
their self concept. Ironically, such affirmations may undermine the
motivational aspect of the negative feedback message. Similarly,
giving unreservedly positive feedback may cause people to become less
motivated and bask in their past good performance.
Total Leadership Experience:
Stewart Friedman examined (2005) the impact of the immersion of managers and
students in a "total leadership" program on their leadership identities,
performance in a range of domains,
and leadership capacities, including authenticity,
integrity, and creativity.
The Upside of Anger and Compassion: Jennifer
Mueller and doctoral student Shimul Melwani examined (2006) how people reacted
when viewing interviews of others. Past research has found that when those
viewed express anger and pride, the viewers see them as having higher status.
Conversely, when those viewed express guilt and sadness, the viewers see them as
having lower standing. This study examined whether the attribution of higher or
lower status stems from the viewers’ inference of competence
– or
other factors –
from the emotions expressed by those interviewed. It also studied
how much additional salary a viewer will give or deny a person expressing these
various emotions.
When Disclosing Information Aids Your
Network: Jennifer Mueller
studied (2006) how
adverse information affects network relations. Research suggests that
disclosing negative information (e.g., admitting mistakes or asking for
help) can have positive benefits for individual performance. However,
a compelling amount of evidence underscores a pervasive perception held by
employees in the workplace that the costs of disclosing negative information
outweigh the benefits. This study explored when disclosing negative
information might aid or hinder others' perceptions of competence and
likeability of a particular individual and the resulting network
associations that ensue. It is anticipated that disclosure of negative
information by individuals contributes to positive trait perceptions and
higher number of ties when individual’s level of status is relatively
similar or high. When an individual's status is relatively low,
disclosing negative information is expected to decreases perceptions of
competence and overall liking, resulting in fewer network ties.
When Worlds Collide in Cyberspace: Work-Nonwork
Boundary Management in Online Social Networking: Nancy Rothbard and
PhD student Justin Berg (2010), in collaboration with Ariane
Ollier-Malaterre of Rouen Business School, explore how people manage the
boundary between their work and nonwork lives on social networking
websites, particularly Facebook. On Facebook, people often experience
the challenge of having their different worlds (e.g., work, family,
friends) collide. This study explores how people do and do not manage
their content and activities on Facebook in response to this challenge,
and the psychological and social consequences of such boundary
management. This study has implications for leadership and
management in that it examines questions such as how people handle
merging private and professional lives in the context of hierarchical
relationships versus peer relationships. For example, what do you do if
your boss “friends” you and vice versa? Moreover, we examine
potential cross cultural differences in how these relationships are
managed through a focus on employees in both the US and France.
Women Stepping-Out and Then Back into the Workforce:
Monica McGrath,
Marla Driscoll
(independent consultant), and Mary Gross (Director,
Merrill Lynch Investment Managers, Head of
Learning & Development) studied (2005) the challenges
faced by professional women who “stepped out” of their careers for a period of
time and then returned to the workforce, or
attempted to do so. They also
examined actions that companies, academic institutions, and individuals
take to facilitate such
re-integration into the workforce.
The Leadership Center also
provided support for conferences, programs,
and seminars, including:
Wharton Micro-Meso Seminar, 2005-08
Wharton Organization Behavior Lab, 2005-08
Wharton Annual Organizational Behavior Conference, 2005-10
Wharton-INSEAD Bi-Annual Leadership Research Conference, 2008, 2010
Wharton Field Application Projects with the United Nations, 2008
Wharton Undergraduate Leadership Conference, 2008
Management 100, Leadership and Communication, 2008-10
Management 652, Leadership and Teamwork, 2008-10
Ivy Leadership Summit, 2008
Wharton Conference on Governance, Leadership, and Networks, 2008
Corporate Governance: An International Review and Wharton Conference
on
"Corporate Governance and the Global Financial Crisis,"
2010
Conference on
Work-Life Issues and Leadership in a Global Economy, 2010-11
As the fabric of the employment
relationship is changing, and employees out of need or preference are changing
their values around how they manage the intersection of their work/non-work
lives, there is a growing understanding among corporate leaders that work-life
issues are very important to consider in how they should structure their
organizations and lead their employees. Much of this change has come from
structural shifts in the labor market such as the increase in women’s employment
and dual career couples. These structural shifts have led to the need to
re-examine leadership and organizational policies regarding work practices in
order to best motivate and support employees in general and high potential
employees in particular. Many employees including dual career men and
women are increasingly seeking flexibility, balance, and opportunities for
integration between their demanding professional and family commitments.
Likewise, those leading organizations with locations around the world confront
issues of relocation decisions for dual-career families and corporate
assignments for high potential employees. Leaders must also make choices about
whether and how to use powerful communication technologies to facilitate working
from home – decisions about whether telecommuting is a desirable practice that
can support needs for flexibility or whether it doesn’t address the core
business requirements that may involve face-to-face encounters with co-workers
and clients on a regular basis. These are but a few of the ways that the
changing nature of the workforce and work-family issues are influencing the ways
that leaders need to think about the workforce. Understanding how to
manage these changes in a workforce with an increasing diversity of family forms
-- single mothers, empty-nesters, and those taking a wide range of routes
through the life course – has become a pressing leadership problem. To
better understand these issues and to bring together scholars doing research on
related topics, Nancy Rothbard and Jerry Jacobs ar hosting a conference that
will address Work Life Issues and in a Global Economy. The conference will draw
from work-life and work-family scholars nationally. A wide range of issues will
be addressed, from sick-leave legislation to elder-care, from time use studies
to efforts to promote synergies between work and family, from challenges of
globalization to leadership in a changing workforce.
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