How to include more women in a recruitment process for male-dominated leadership roles? That’s the key question that researchers from Cornell University, London Business School and the Stern School of Business at New York University tried to answer in their research. Recruitment of the top leadership team is a key success factor for organizations, as every success on the market starts with having the right people in the top team. Having a diverse top team…

Psychologists have tried to identify which leadership behaviors were seen as the most helpful ones from an employee perspective during the COVID-19 pandemic COVID-19 has had a profound impact on the way we work. In many industries, remote work and home offices have become a widespread standard, other industries were hit so hard that many people lost their jobs. As every crisis situation, the COVID crisis also involves a high degree of uncertainty. What kind…

Researchers from Imperial College London, Cornell University and Harvard University analyzed job descriptions for top executives over a time period of 17 years from 2000 to 2017. Their analysis shows that social skills are gaining more and more relevance compared to “traditional” management skills. The researchers used methods that are typically also used in machine learning algorithms to analyze how C-suite job descriptions (e.g. for CEOs, CFOs, CIOs) have changed over time. The data was…

It is not only through good arguments that leaders can convince and influence others. Recent research results about how entrepreneurs influence investors in entrepreneurial pitches provide insights into the importance of a leader’s visual presence. Chia-Jung Tsay, Associate Professor at the UCL School of Management, tried to find factors that could predict which entrepreneurs would get funded by investors in entrepreneurial pitch competitions. For that purpose, she presented 1,855 study participants with various recordings of…

What do leaders regret when they are reflecting on their prior decisions and actions? The research of Helen Mary Meldrum from Bentley University (USA) reveals the lessons that leaders have learned from professional disappointments. Leaders need to make a lot of choices, and every choice has opportunity costs attached to it (otherwise it would not be a choice in the first place). This, however, also means that there is potential for regret inherent in every…

There are many similarities between boat racing and managing an organization in a fast-changing environment. In both cases, there are clear goals (to win!), time pressure, and a need for coordinated action that allows the team to quickly react to the changes in the environment and to be faster and better than the competition. Two French researchers analyzed how an experienced skipper handled the coordination task in a fleet race. They observed two general patterns of coordination…

Are you familiar with that situation? You want to change things for the better and launch a new initiative for taking your organization a step ahead. But instead of applause and support from your team, you just earn skepticism and open or passive resistance. Recent research has found a surprisingly simple reason for why people resist to change in organizations. Many reasons for people to be resistant to change have been explored before, for example,…

Things go wrong wherever people work. But is it a good idea to let your followers followers about past failures? A team of researchers from Germany and the UK found a surprising answer to this question. The researchers collaborated with an advertising agency that organized a mailing campaign for a charity. The aim of the campaign was to recruit volunteers for the charity. 12,500 letters were sent out for that purpose. Less than 0.1 percent…