Organizational Behavior
When Crises Hit, Shovel-Ready Ideas Can Get Greenlighted Quickly
Frontline staff and managers often face years of resistance and red tape when they try to improve organizational processes. But a Yale SOM study suggests that crises can create windows of opportunity to get those changes implemented—if advocates move fast and demonstrate the short- and long-term value of their ideas.
When Is It OK to Use Connections to Land a Job?
New research co-authored by Yale SOM’s Laura Adler explores how people reconcile conflicting beliefs about the roles of social capital and merit in the job search. Their results show that widely held attitudes about when it’s acceptable to make use of connections can help perpetuate inequality.
Small Changes, Big Results: Research-Backed Tips for Living a Good Life in 2025
We asked Yale SOM faculty for their best tips on living happily, healthily, and productively in the new year.
Our Most-Read Stories of 2024
This year, faculty and alumni experts helped us understand issues including the expanding role of AI in our society, the new space economy, the impact of gender in the workplace, the keys to financing a greener economy, and the psychological quirks that lead us toward irrational economic choices.
Finding the Blueprint for Thriving Organizations
Professor James Baron’s research helped establish the now-commonplace understanding that the way a company organizes itself—what we now call its human-capital strategy—is key to creating a happy, equitable culture and ultimately to survival and success.
The Ethnography of Organizational Change
Using the tools of ethnography, Yale SOM’s Julia DiBenigno meticulously documents the lived experience of people at work to uncover the root causes of complex problems and devise solutions that change organizations for the better.
Doing What You Love Doesn’t Always Pay for Women
New research from Yale SOM’s Adriana Germano shows how the seemingly gender-neutral advice to “follow your passion” helps explain the gender gap in lucrative STEM fields.
U.S. Government Regulators May Be Favoring Their Future Private-Sector Employers
How does the “revolving door” between government and industry benefit firms? A new study co-authored by Yale SOM’s Ivana Katic finds that firms see a smoother regulatory process in the months before they hire a former regulator, suggesting that they may find favor via the promise of future employment.
Reinventing the Way We Work—Again
The pandemic changed where we work and how we work, how we think about the place of work in our lives and vice versa—all against a backdrop of rapid technological change, economic upheaval, and a reckoning with racism. We talked with Yale SOM's Heidi Brooks about how to have necessary conversations about a new experience of work.
The Dark Side of an Idealized Picture of Nursing
A new ethnographic study from Yale SOM’s Julia DiBenigno illustrates how a focus by workers on a fantasy version of their job can get in the way of organizational goals.
Why Accountability Needs an Upgrade
In an excerpt from their new book, Conscious Accountability, Yale SOM’s David Tate and his co-authors Marianne Pantalon and Daryn David argue for looking beyond blame and punishment and embracing a form of accountability based on clear communication and mutual trust.
