Cambridge Judge Business School Discussions on Organisational Behaviour

"The boat could be regarded as a bright yellow cash machine floating past." Mark de Rond puts kidnap and being taken hostage above fast-flowing debris and waterborne parasites as he and fellow rower Anton Wright get set to row the River Amazon without support.

Dr Jonathan Trevor is to chair a major summit on what he calls the 'thorny and perennial issue' of reward at work. The day-long conference is being hosted jointly by Cambridge Judge Business School and America's WorldatWork, the association for HR professionals. Titled 'The Future of Reward: Strategies for a Hyper-competitive World', the summit aims to attract broad interest with a guest-speaker programme that includes policy-makers, practitioners and academics.

According to Dr Jonathan Trevor it's time to revisit the management of pay. Instead of using it to leverage value, it should be approached as a risk with the primary focus on protecting value. In his paper 'From New Pay to the New, New Pay' Dr Trevor lays out some principles for consideration by the business and human resources communities. These include the suggestion that pay is an enabler not a driver and that it's like plumbing: it should matter only when it goes wrong.

A mix of half-day practical and virtual sessions form the backbone of Executive Education’s new Cambridge Business Breakthrough Series, which aims to address challenging business issues. Among these issues, says Executive Education’s Cathy Butler, are innovation and creativity within an organisation, strategic performance management, organisational burn-out and strategic decision-making.

Law firms are facing dramatic changes in the legal services sector as it navigates through a 'near perfect storm'. Challenges are being thrown up by the economic downturn fuelled by sophisticated demands around delivery and pricing, off-shoring and market liberalisation that allows non-lawyers to own legal businesses. In the future, Tim Bellis believes that law firms may need to alter their hiring policies in the future to reflect their approach to increasingly commoditised work-streams where the best and brightest are replaced by the plodders.

"Getting Explicit about the Implicit", co-authored by Dr Jochen Menges of Cambridge Judge Business School, explores the unintentional, spontaneous and often unconscious 'implicit' measures that influence workplace behaviours.

Dr Jonathan Trevor is calling for a new approach to reward policy. Organisations, he says, are really struggling with the issue of performance and relative reward. It is leading to underlying conflict in the workplace, which he warns is discreet but ever present.

Fresh research by Dr Andreas Richter into creative self-efficacy and creativity in teams has thrown new light onto an area overlooked in previous studies. Prior research noted significant but not consistently strong relationships between creative self-efficacy and individual creativity, but the latest findings indicate the link is very positive.

Dr Mark de Rond looks at why it's so hard to get teams to realise their potential, how to enable people to work more effectively on teams and why there's conflict when a team's intentions are aligned. He questions whether that conflict is harmful or if it actually helps the team dynamic.

Research by Professor Martin Kilduff reveals that managers who help employees to deal with negative emotions feel their actions are 'extra-role behaviour' above-and-beyond their managerial duties. Employees, he says, do not expect any reciprocation, but managers on the other hand, expect personal commitment in return and that, Professor Kilduff warns, could lead to problems.

One of the greatest risks to team stability, explains Dr Mark de Rond, recently returned from fieldwork with the high-performance surgical teams at Britain's Camp Bastion military hospital in Afghanistan, is boredom. Under pressure, teams of high performers function exceptionally well. But when bored, the qualities that produce exceptional performance under pressure risk destabilising the team. How do you deal with a sense of futility and boredom?

Top managers 'think', whilst middle managers 'act', but shouldn't both work together to bring about change? Dr Shahzad Ansari explains why middle managers can't play a 'linking role' in the change process unless they are included in the strategy formulation of the change process.

Morale in a workforce can impact productivity by between 10 and 20 per cent according to Dr Ben Hardy, who has just completed a four-year study into the subject.

Loosely coupled networks, like those used in medieval Britain and 14th century Tuscany, are increasingly being adopted by leading modern companies.

The 'soft HR' approach is best. Senior Lecturer in Corporate Governance Dr Philip Stiles explains why brand reputation will suffer if employees are made redundant in the wrong way. Avoid the knee jerk reaction, engage the CEO to set the tone and adopt a planned approach for a successful outcome to a difficult situation.

Will changes to employment law make it easier for firms to take workers on, or will it be an erosion of workers' rights? Lifting the burden of regulation on business might make the UK more competitive, but Professor Simon Deakin, Fellow in Corporate Governance at Cambridge Judge Business School, says further changes could have an adverse impact on our knowledge economy.

Dr Jonathan Trevor explores the challenges of implementing systems that generate desirable behaviour and attract and retain talent.

Professor Martin Kilduff and Dr Jochen Menges say their studies into the self-serving benefits of Emotional Intelligence has revealed a little understood 'dark side' that requires greater investigation!

Dr Jonathan Trevor argues that we will see a move away from large scale public sector organisations which are the providers of professional services to public services organisations which are the commissioners of professionals from the public, private and not for profit sector to provide these services. The question he asks is how do we ensure these public servants and organisations are best fit for purpose to deliver this agenda.

There is no definable body of knowledge that constitutes the skills of management says Dr Richard Barker, a former Director of the Cambridge MBA. It has no professional body controlling membership, enabling practice or exclusion and there can never be one because "management does not have a narrowly defined body of knowledge".

The 'software of the mind' - Professor Hofstede explains why cultures with long term perspectives succeed

Next time you are at a social gathering, instead of chatting just to friends and colleagues, why not strike up a conversation with a complete stranger? For the effects of making contacts outside your usual circle may, according to new research by Judge Business School's Professor Martin Kilduff, be much further-reaching than you think. A diverse range of social contacts can affect not just your enjoyment of a particular social occasion but also your work performance and promotion prospects.

In the past pay was simply a necessary cost to do business. Today pay has viewed as an inducement model, it is the carrot, not the stick. However Dr Jonathan Trevor explains that this practice of using pay as a strategic management tool has been over embellished by HR departments. The resulting imbalance between top executives pay and that of all employees is in fact counterproductive, fostering an unintended climate of negative employee relations. Dr Trevor explains why the "art" of management science needs to be re-dressed and why pay wont motivate people to work harder.

More and more companies are being forced to make redundancies as the downturn deepens. Whilst the outcome of downsizing is rarely seen as good, it can still be a success if the process is fair. Dr Philip Stiles gives some advise on 'soft landings' and how to make the process less traumatic for both those being made redundant and for their managers.

Is it shaped by social imperatives or should it be held as an economic negotiation? Dr Jonathan Trevor discusses this contentious issue, calling for an increase in transparency and more direct dialogue and consensus between shareholders and executives on what constitutes good governance as opposed to a reliance on using intermediary bodies: "We need to bridge the gap between the interests of shareholders and the interests of the executives. One size does not fit all and it is where we have seen prescriptive 'best practice' applied without contextual sensitivity, that we've seen the systems fail, with executives being incentivised for what amounts to bad behaviour with negative outcomes for the companies involved."

Let's have less pride, and more shame, in the workplace: In the current climate, where business has almost become an ethics-free zone, Dr Stiles talks about his new research which looks at the negative emotion of shame and how he discovered that used properly, it can actually play a positive role in the workplace in helping both to motivate people and to encourage them to regulate their behaviour. He says, "Shame is always seen as a negative emotion. But in fact there are some positives for companies in using the mechanism of shame to help ensure that people do try and live up to the expectations we have of them."

In these credit crunch times, organisations need to be able to act smarter and effectively do more with the less. Highly motivated and talented people will therefore be at a premium. However, what makes these individuals creative and innovative can also make them tricky to manage. So, how should organisations best maximise these volatile and strong willed premium resources? Dr Mark de Rond, drawing on his unique research into the team dynamics of the Cambridge boat team, offers advice on how to resolve the tensions that naturally arise in high performance teams.

Professor Martin Kilduff considers how our effectiveness in our jobs is influenced by our social networks. His paper "Job Design: A Social Network Perspective" is an Aladdin's cave of good tips for managers and employees alike. Professor Kilduff explains how our colleagues around us and our informal groupings in the workplace play a significant role in how effectively we carry out our jobs.

We think of effective human resource management (HRM) as the means to value creation, organisational performance and competitive advantage, however, we understand much less well how ineffective HRM can inhibit organizational performance, destroy value and competitiveness. Dr Jonathan Trevor takes the current financial crisis and explains how it is an example of a human capital crisis. He argues that it had its genesis in the failure to manage human resources effectively, be they executives of financial institutions, bankers and traders, regulators acting on behalf of government, employees in the automotive sector… not since the winter of discontent in 1979 has our economic and social well-being, societally and personally, been so dependent on how effectively people, as human capital, are managed.

As we enter a more remote, more atomised working future Dr Jonathan Trevor says it offers new opportunities.

Jochen Menges, Lecturer in Human Resources and Organisations, says the new epidemic affecting us is speed. He explains that simply working harder isn't always good for profitability. It can lead to what he calls "the acceleration trap" and organisational burn out. Breaking free of that "speed" trap is the challenge facing managers. Now is the time to ask: "what can I stop doing?"