Entrepreneurship & Innovation

Successful managers and leaders need to effectively navigate their organizational worlds, from motivating customers and employees to managing diversity to preventing and resolving conflicts. Perspective-taking is a psychological process that is particularly relevant to each of these activities. The current review critically examines perspective-taking research conducted by both management scholars and social psychologists and specifies perspective-taking's antecedents, consequences, mechanisms, and moderators, as well as identifies theoretical and/or empirical shortfalls.

This review synthesizes research on power and morality. Although power is typically viewed as undermining the roots of moral behavior, this paper proposes power can either morally corrupt or morally elevate individuals depending on two crucial factors. First, power can trigger behavioral disinhibition. As a consequence, power fosters corruption by disinhibiting people's immoral desires, but can also encourage ethical behavior by amplifying moral impulses. Second, power leads people to focus more on their self, relative to others.

Eight studies found a robust negative relationship between the experience of power and the experience of loneliness. Dispositional power and loneliness were negatively correlated (Study 1). Experimental inductions established causality: we manipulated high versus low power through autobiographical essays, assignment to positions, or control over resources, and found that each manipulation showed that high versus low power decreased loneliness (Studies 2a–2c).

At some point, every company makes a mistake that requires an apology — to an individual; a group of customers, employees, or business partners; or the public at large. And more often than not, companies and their leaders fail to apologize effectively, if at all, which can severely damage their reputations and their relationships with stakeholders. Companies need clearer guidelines for determining whether a mistake merits an apology and, when it does, for crafting and delivering an effective message.

Having a well-defined hierarchy can contribute to organizational effectiveness: it helps people know who does what, when and how, and promotes efficient interactions by setting clear expectations for the behaviors of people of different ranks. This is especially true when people feel under threat, helping to restore a sense of order and control. However, sometimes hierarchy can hurt as much as it helps. In complex, dynamic situations, leaders need access to the most complete and varied information to make the best decisions.

Although economists, politicians, and business leaders have long emphasized the importance of entrepreneurship, defining and characterizing entrepreneurship has been elusive. Researchers have been unable to systematically connect the type of high-impact entrepreneurship found in regions such as Silicon Valley with the overall incidence of entrepreneurship in the population.

Power transforms consumer behavior. This research introduces a critical theoretical moderator of power's effects by promoting the idea that power is accompanied by both an experience (how it feels to have or lack power) and expectations (schemas and scripts as to how those with or without power behave). In some cases, the psychological experience of power predisposes people to behave one way, whereas attention to the expectations of power suggests behaving in another way. As a consequence, power's effects for consumer behavior can hinge on consumers' focus.

Five studies examined the relationship between talent and team performance. Two survey studies found that people believe there is a linear and nearly monotonic relationship between talent and performance: Participants expected that more talent improves performance and that this relationship never turns negative. However, building off research on status conflicts, we predicted that talent facilitates performance — but only up to a point, after which the benefits of more talent decrease and eventually become detrimental as intrateam coordination suffers.