Organizational Behavior

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.

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Podcast

Learning Through Experience

We all want work—and life—to be better. So how do we make it happen? How can we learn from the experience we have to create a future that we want? This is the realm that much of Dr. Heidi Brooks’ work explores. As we navigate the everyday, she invites us to cultivate the capacity to learn through experience, and to apply the wisdom gained to co-create a future that is worth fighting for.

Almost all adults work and experience organizational life. Work is the common connector; it dominates where we engage with the world and where the world engages with us. And for Dr. Brooks, it’s a canvas for the great re-imagining of our humanity. So, what can we do every day to help create an experience of work that people want to be part of? This everyday leadership invitation goes beyond deliverables and tasks into thinking of work as a space that we co-create.

Season Three of the Learning Through Experience podcast echos Dr. Brooks’ course structure, centered on interpersonal and group dynamics. Even at Yale, there is a place for learning through experience—not just books. The answer you seek is not on page 4. Watch and listen as Dr. Brooks meets with colleagues and authorities in their fields about transformative experiences that shape and shift how we learn and listen, feel and connect, reinforcing that experience precedes thinking that challenges our paradigms and assumptions.

In order to challenge the status quo, we need to have experiences that open us up to learning. Are you ready? Join us for Season Three of Learning Through Experience.

All Episodes

  • Finding the Blueprint for Thriving Organizations

    James N. Baron

    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.

    James Baron

  • The Ethnography of Organizational Change

    Julia DiBenigno

    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.

    Julia DiBenigno

  • Doing What You Love Doesn’t Always Pay for Women

    Adriana Germano

    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.

    A woman following a sign pointing to "passion" at a fork in the road

  • U.S. Government Regulators May Be Favoring Their Future Private-Sector Employers

    Ivana V. Katic

    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.

    A person pushing through a revolving door decorated with the American flag and dollar signs

  • Reinventing the Way We Work—Again

    Heidi Brooks

    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.

    An illustration of shapes trying to get into an office through holes that are don't match

  • The Dark Side of an Idealized Picture of Nursing

    Julia DiBenigno

    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.

    A fuzzy images of nurses with a patient

  • Why Accountability Needs an Upgrade

    Daryn H. David Marianne Pantalon David C. Tate

    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.

    A trapeze artist balancing on the head of another trapeze artist

  • Smarter Ways to Look Ahead: Research-Based Suggestions for a Better 2023

    We asked faculty from the Yale School of Management to put a scholarly lens on improving our personal and professional lives in the coming year.

    A vintage image of a person looking through a telescope

  • How Grammy Wins and Losses Shape Artists’ Creative Trajectories

    Balázs Kovács

    Prof. Balázs Kovács and his co-authors found that Grammy winners tend to branch out in new directions afterward—but nominees who don’t win become more creatively cautious.

    Billie Eilish with an armful of trophies at the Grammy Awards in 2020.

  • To Be Happier at Work, Think Flexibly about Your Job—and Yourself

    Amy Wrzesniewski

    In a new paper, Yale SOM’s Amy Wrzesniewski and her co-authors find that well-being can be enhanced by pairing a shift in your job mindset with changes in how you think about your own strengths and weaknesses.

    An illustration of a person at a computer with trees growing out of their head and fingers