Jean-François Harvey

Harvard University | Harvard · Harvard Business School

Strategic change in organizations prompts pervasive ambiguity. As change initiatives cascade down the hierarchy, they can be met with habitual, inertial responses that ultimately generate negatively charged emotions—or they can prompt novel, experimental behaviors that forestall them. What remains unclear, however, is which factors drive teams, and...

Scanning the environment for information about competitors, technology trends, or customer needs allows firms to sense opportunities and threats, which supports dynamic capabilities and helps firms remain competitive over time. There has been significant theoretical development on the cognitive antecedents of dynamic capabilities—so-called dynamic...

As more jobs require employees to continually learn and adapt, empowering employees to adopt learning goals becomes a competitive advantage. Although research has identified key leadership behaviors that empower employees, the relationship between managers and empowered employees is ongoing and dynamic. Therefore, it is important to understand how...

Though leader agreeableness has been associated with follower ratings of leader effectiveness, the relationship between leader agreeableness and team task performance is more tenuous. We propose that leader agreeableness stifles team leaders' effectiveness by moderating the efficacy of their constructive feedback to the team. We argue that feedback...

Purpose This study aims to empirically examine the relationship between the leader characteristic of humility and the informal learning of team members. It also evaluates the role of leader authenticity in mediating that relationship. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected on 518 salespeople reporting to 66 managers in a time-lagged study...

Despite the recent surge of research on leader humility, it is still unclear how and when teams benefit from it. Drawing on social cognitive theory, we propose a moderated mediation model that we test using multisource, time‐lagged data collected from 71 teams in a university‐affiliated hospital. We find that humble leaders indirectly enhance team...

Charismatiques et visionnaires, des leaders nous marquent souvent en raison de leur personnalité flamboyante, de leur éloquence et de leur assurance. Faut-il alors s’étonner que plusieurs gestionnaires soient réticents à se comporter avec humilité ? Et pourtant, une majorité d’employés apprécient les dirigeants qui osent en faire preuve.

Nonprofit organizations are increasingly relying on temporary project teams to carry out their activities. Time is of the essence with such endeavors. Diverse individuals join a project team and work through several phases in order to reach their goal. Because team needs will fluctuate over time, the focus of leadership is also likely to change. Un...

Ne pas se sentir à la hauteur malgré les succès obtenus, l’expérience accumulée et toute l’expertise acquise : c’est ce que ressentent de nombreuses femmes dans le monde des affaires. Alors qu’on entend de plus en plus parler du syndrome de l’imposteur, peu d’études scientifiques existent sur ce sujet. Tour d’horizon.

In this paper, we consider how the four key team emergent states for team learning identified by Bell et al. (2012), namely psychological safety, goal orientation, cohesion, and efficacy, operate as a system that produces the team’s learning climate (TLC). Using the language of systems dynamics, we conceptualize TLC as a stock that rises and falls...

Do teams with motivation to learn actually engage in the behaviors that produce learning? Though team learning orientation has been found to be positively related to team learning, we know little about how and when it actually fosters team learning. It is obviously not the only factor that may impact learning in teams. Team psychological safety, or...

How does one learn and build credibility simultaneously? Such is the challenge faced by an increasing number of professionals, who must quickly get to grips with new assignments while displaying sufficient knowledge to be regarded as experts. If they do not, they will be unable to exert influence over the situation. To address this puzzle, we draw...

Cross-boundary teaming, within and across organizations, is an increasingly popular strategy for innovation. Knowledge diversity is seen to expand the range of views and ideas that teams can draw upon to innovate. Yet, case studies reveal that teaming across knowledge boundaries can be difficult in practice, and innovation is not always realized. T...

Can a consortium of 16 organizations, including multinational corporations, local government agencies, and startups, turn a rundown Paris suburb into a “smart” (ecologically viable, high-tech, livable) neighborhood? This case explores how Bouygues Immobilier led such a project involving Alstom, Bouygues Energies & Services, Bouygues Telecom, EDF (E...

OVERVIEW: Drawing on a case study at Ubisoft, a major creative firm in the videogame industry, this article shows how a firm can nurture and engage with its knowing communities to fuel the front end of innovation. Actions taken by management can catalyze four types of knowing community activities: unscripted internal activities, which are emergent,...

Non-traditional experts, as an ever-growing group of workers in the post-industrial economy, face what we call the “expert-novice” paradox. They must achieve both knowledge and credibility at the same time, proving competent in new situations even as they discover them. To help resolve this paradox, they use “leverage work”: a set of tactics that d...

Although interest in dynamic capabilities has grown rapidly in recent years, the study of its micro-foundations has remained fixated on the role of managers, particularly their entrepreneurial attributes and cognitive abilities. This research has generated organizational processes that stem from individualistic models of decision-making, and overlo...

Les différentes normes et approches de gestion auxquelles les établissements de santé et de services sociaux choisissent d'adhérer amènent leur lot de défis transfor-mationnels : élargir sa vision de l'équipe; penser globalement et de façon plus durable; adopter des modes de travail collaboratif; remettre en question les façons de faire et de pense...

Les gestionnaires sont de plus en plus convaincus que la generation et le developpement d’idees representent des enjeux prioritaires pour l’organisation. Gerer strategiquement les idees permet a leur organisation d’innover plus souvent, plus rapidement ou plus radicalement. Cela peut contribuer, d’une part, a maintenir des parts de marche ou a en g...

This paper explores the purposeful design and development of a community of practice within a professional bureaucracy. The view of communities of practice has shifted from fundamentally organic entities to ones that can be deliberately designed and developed and they have frequently been presented as a panacea for knowledge sharing and creation, a...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide the systematic analysis of an innovative, intergenerational knowledge transfer strategy in a knowledge‐intensive organization. Design/methodology/approach The case study method was adopted to study the intergenerational knowledge transfer activities. A triangulated approach was employed in respect of...

Etant donne que toute innovation provient d’un processus creatif qui, lui, decoule de l’utilisation et de la transformation de connaissances explicites et tacites, une organisation voulant innover doit se demarquer sur ce qui est tres difficile, voire impossible, a imiter : la gestion de ses connaissances, et plus particulierement le partage de cel...