Academy of Management Insights

Imposter Syndrome’s Upside: Strong People Skills https://lnkd.in/etU6R_Xt An Academy of Management Journal article reveals that people who secretly believe their colleagues overestimate their competence may be more valuable than they realize. This finding, by Basima Tewfik of MIT Sloan School of Management, challenges the common wisdom that #ImposterSyndrome is uniformly harmful.

AOM scholars' research findings related to the C-suite: https://lnkd.in/eMt2gxwS

Holiday #Consumerism Is at the Heart of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol https://lnkd.in/ezE5T6ZC There’s much more to Charles Dickens’ classic holiday tale than Scrooge’s fall and redemption, according to Philip Hancock of the University of Essex. “For those who point to Christmas having become too commercial, too obsessed with commodities and goods and gifts, I think that’s a valid criticism. But what Dickens reminds us is that #Christmas has always had that element to it. We are creatures of the marketplace. We see the marketplace as a medium of social interaction, and we shouldn’t deny that. There is no point in saying that buying and selling, or exchanging goods and presents, should be kept out of Christmas. It’s always been part of the season. That’s integral to what we are,” Hancock said. “What Dickens is trying to say is that there’s nothing wrong with wealth or the marketplace,” Hancock said. “A lot of people take A Christmas Carol to be a book that is anti-business, an almost quasi-socialist text. What Dickens is arguing, however, is that Scrooge, rather than just acting in a solitary way, has to get out into the marketplace. Market exchange, which Scrooge witnessed around him as he was flying with the ghosts, was part of people’s social lives, part of London’s social life. And that was a source of goodness, a source of people coming to know each other, engage with each other and understand each other’s strengths, weaknesses, hopes and fears."

Today is the 15th anniversary of the release of Avatar! How Avatar Reduced Novelty to Boost Creativity: https://lnkd.in/gmU7CDgf The visually stunning alien world of Pandora and its inhabitants helped make #Avatar the highest-grossing movie of all time. Despite all its accolades for #creativity, part of the film’s success was due to reining in creativity, according to an Academy of Management Review article by Joshua Katz of the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Lillien M. Ellis of the University of Virginia Darden School of Business.

Values Play A Vital Role In Making Business Friendships https://lnkd.in/emcJ3tQD Shared values loom large in establishing business #friendships, but have little or no influence on whether those ties endure, according to an Academy of Management Discoveries article. For the past 15 years, Paul Ingram of Columbia University has been working with value structures and devised a workshop process that allows people to identify which #values matter most to them, and to recognize interdependencies among their values. Many students keep their structures in their wallets, on a “value card.” “Years later, people still carry their value cards with them. They send me pictures of themselves in a café in Paris with their values cards,” he said. Ingram and coauthor Yoonjin Choi of William & Mary University took a deep dive into how shared values affect work #relationships. Shared values are a source of interpersonal chemistry because they mean that people are striving for the same things at work and in life. That’s why shared values are also important in building #teams that are committed to their mission. “Business friendships explain who gets promoted, how you get paid, whether you’re good at executing your work,” Ingram said. “If you express your values, you build a bridge that is the foundation of the relationship.”

Women’s Career Self-Help Books: Pros and Cons https://lnkd.in/epYC-exA The market for self-help books aimed at women who want to climb the career ladder is booming. But is it making a difference? “Popular literature for women in business raises consciousness and encourages them to take action to advance their careers,” said Isabel Metz of the University of Melbourne. “The big question is: Can individual action stimulate career opportunities for women?” More than 3,500 books are available in English via Amazon in the “women and business” category, including Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 bestseller Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead. Metz and coauthor Savita Kumra of the American University of Sharjah examined women’s career self-help books dating back to 1967 in their Academy of Management Perspectives article. Metz and Kumra found three distinct trends: ► Fix the woman (1967–1976), when females were encouraged to build their human capital through #training, #education, tenure, and experience. ► Fix the organization (1977–1996), when organizations sought to help women through such initiatives as #mentoring programs. ► Fix the environment (1997–2016), a period when government and institutions introduced #gender quotas and raised awareness of #GenderInequality in the workplace.