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According to a new study by researchers at Cornell University, the key to long-term survival for many businesses is having a woman in charge .  (Emphasis mine.) This it is not exactly Earth-shattering news.  Not only is having a woman run a business known to increase its chances of success, it's also been shown that having women on the board of directors of a major corporation increases the company's success and profitability.  This also applies to having women in management positions within a larger company.  Research published within the last year demonstrates that those divisions of a company tend to be more successful and more profitable.   This is not political correctness.  These conclusions are based on scientific fact.  And as many have said, scientific fact is true whether you believe it or not. Yet, despite their demonstrated superiority as managers,  women are paid less than men for yielding more profit and longer success to a company. ...

The question for many employers large and small is whether making social changes or physical changes lead to better productivity or lower absenteeism.  Or would a combination of changes have the best outcome?  According to this research, an employer is better served by either making social changes or physical changes - but not the two together. Here's the report: C hanges targeting the social or physical workplace environment have some positive effects on work-related outcomes —- but at least so far, evidence doesn't support a combination of the two approaches, a new report concludes.  Social changes such as  group motivational interviews led to improved work task performance, while the  physical change such as establishing specific areas for quiet work, meetings, and recreation was associated with employees being more fully concentrated and immersed in work tasks. Researchers evaluated the effects of changes to the social and physical w...

A critical job performance evaluation can have a negative effect on any employee, according to research. By studying how people view positive or negative feedback a researcher has determined that nobody -- even people who are motivated to learn -- likes negative performance reviews. She is therefore developing ways to help managers improve the process for reviewing employees, and provides some pointers in her newly published article. Suggested Reading Click on image Culbertson and collaborators at Eastern Kentucky University and Texas A&M University surveyed more than 200 staffers who had just completed performance reviews at a large southern university. The research appears in the Journal of Personnel Psychology. The researchers first assessed employees' goal orientations: Learning goal-oriented people like to learn for the sake of learning. They often pursue challenges despite setbacks. Performance-prove goal-oriented people want to prove that they have competence to perform...

Original article written by Diamond Dixon S elf-employment can allow older workers to stay in the labor market longer and earn additional income, yet little research has addressed if reasons for self-employment vary across gender and culture. Now, University of Missouri researchers have studied factors that contribute to self-employment and found these factors differ for men and women in the United States and New Zealand. Suggested Reading "Gender is one of the most enduring social factors in the U.S. and New Zealand, a fact that is particularly evident in differing economic opportunities for men and women and their decisions to be self-employed," said Angela Curl, an assistant professor in the MU School of Social Work and the study's lead author. Men more likely to be self-employed Curl analyzed survey data from the 2010 Health and Retirement Study of U.S. adults and the New Zealand Longitudinal Study of Aging and found that men in each country were more likely than wome...

L ying about performance on one task may increase creativity on a subsequent task by making people feel less bound by conventional rules, according to new research. Suggested Reading Click on image New research shows that lying about performance on one task may increase creativity on a subsequent task by making people feel less bound by conventional rules. "The common saying that 'rules are meant to be broken' is at the root of both creative performance and dishonest behavior," says lead researcher Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School. "Both creativity and dishonesty, in fact, involve rule breaking." To examine the link between dishonesty and creativity, Gino and colleague Scott Wiltermuth of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California designed a series of experiments that allowed, and even sometimes encouraged, people to cheat. In the first experiment, for example, participants were presented with a series of number matrice...

Baseball great and world-renowned malapropist, Yogi Berra, and one of his best known comments. For so many small business people and self-employed entrepreneurs, their business is part of their self-expression.  So, they will dress in a way that fits their own mental picture of who they feel they are - without considering the first impression they give a prospective client or customer. In sales, it's standard practice for the salesperson to enter a room, greet the person they are meeting with, then to look away from the prospect and at their briefcase or other material for the count of ten before looking back at the prospect to start the meeting. Why?  Because most sales or client relationships are created in the first ten seconds based on the prospect's first impression of the salesperson.  Everything the salesperson says or proves from this point is pure window dressing. This is why it is so very important for you to project an image that fits in with your prospect's id...

Have you ever wondered where the mandatory retirement age of 65 came from?  Why 65?  Why not 60?  Or 72? From a European history class I took way back when, I learned that the age of 65 for retirement was essentially plucked from the air by Otto von Bismark, the chancellor of Prussia, in the 1840s as part of a compromise with European labor unions.  Bismark was trying to unite the many small Germanic states into a greater Germany, and was meeting resistance from the unions. Suggested Reading Click on image Bismark offered a state funded retirement to any worker once they reached the age of 65, which the majority of workers accepted and the unions agreed to.  The kicker in the plan was that the average age when most adult males died in the mid-19th century was 45, so the plan wasn't going to cost the government much money. Flash forward to today, and most Americans and Europeans are living well into their seventh and eighth decades, relatively healthy and often a...

The Ross Island Grocery & Cafe, in a Southwest neighborhood of Portlandia. (The author's favorite.) O f all the fancy often expensive sales training and merchandising entrepreneurs employ, research clearly shows that certain, very inexpensive, tactics are far more effective in creating loyal customers. Why put a big comfy couch in the corner of the local bookshop? Why provide stacks of board games free of charge at the corner café?  Why give out complimentary backstage passes after the show? Because by making people feel at home in a commercial space, marketers can turn their own clients into salespeople. Suggested Reading Click on image A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research takes a closer look at this new trend in marketing and proves that a sense of homeyness results in a fierce loyalty in customers, who in turn demonstrate an enthusiasm and sense of commitment that goes beyond the norms. These emotionally attached customers pay higher tips, volunteer to help the bu...

" When people feel financially deprived they are more likely to relax their standards and transgress to improve their financial situation ." We like to think we'd stick to our ethical principles no matter what. But when people feel financially deprived -- as many did from losses suffered thanks to the last market and banking meltdown -- they are more likely to relax their moral standards and transgress to improve their financial situation. They are also more likely to judge other deprived moral offenders who do the same more leniently, says a paper to be published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes this past fall. Suggested Reading Click on image "We found that most respondents did not think financial deprivation would lead them to behave immorally," said Nina Mažar, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management and one of the lead researchers of the study. "Yet, once they actually ex...

" Only 40 percent of Americans get enough sleep on most nights and a commonly cited reason is smartphone usage for work ." Using a smartphone to cram in more work at night results in less work the next day, indicates new research co-authored by a Michigan State University business scholar. Recommended Reading Click on image In a pair of studies surveying a broad spectrum of U.S. workers, Russell Johnson and colleagues found that people who monitored their smart phones for business purposes after 9 p.m. were more tired and were less engaged the following day on the job. "Smartphones are almost perfectly designed to disrupt sleep," said Johnson, MSU assistant professor of management who acknowledges keeping his smartphone at his bedside at night. "Because they keep us mentally engaged late into the evening, they make it hard to detach from work so we can relax and fall asleep." More than half of U.S. adults own a smartphone. Many consider the devices to be a...

Wow, really?  Have we become addicted to our cell phones? Recommended Reading Can it really be? Oops, gotta a call coming in.  Just a moment. . . Okay,  Just a friend asking what I'm doing right now. Where were we? Oh, cell phone addiction.  According to a 2012 study out of Baylor University, we are and more to the point, this is driven by "materialism and impulsiveness."  Worse yet, this addiction can be "compared to pathologies like compulsive buying and credit card misuse." Pathologies.  Whoof. "Cell phones are a part of our consumer culture," said study author James Roberts, Ph.D., professor of marketing and the Ben H. Williams Professor of Marketing at Baylor's Hankamer School of Business. "They are not just a consumer tool, but are used as a status symbol. They're also eroding our personal relationships." Cell phones are part of the conspicuous consumption ritual  pacifies the impulsive tendencies of the user, and play an import...

" Health and wealth may be more strongly connected than previously thought ." We ring in the New Year with hopes of being healthy, wealthy, and wise. A new study from researchers John W. Ayers of San Diego State University and Benjamin Althouse of the Santa Fe Institute and their colleagues suggests that health and wealth may be more strongly connected than previously thought. Suggested Reading Click on image The group examined Americans' Google search patterns and discovered that during the recent Great Recession, people searched considerably more frequently for information about health ailments. The kinds of problems indicated by the queries weren't life threatening, but they could keep someone in the bed a few days, like ulcers, headaches, and back pain. In total, the team found there were more than 200 million excess queries of this kind during the Great Recession than expected. "While it's impossible to uncover the motives for increased searches, they li...

" Emphasis on the entrepreneur is directly related to the probability of success in securing seed funding in the artistic category ." Early on in our careers, many of us were tutored as to how to best write an effective and attention-getting curriculum vitae (CV) in looking for a job. But in today's world, many are looking not for just a job, but are engaged in wide, often Internet-based searches for seed money to launch entrepreneurial ventures of one sort of another. But what guidelines exist as to the best way to go about securing this kind of funding? To look into this issue and provide some answers, an extensive research project was launched at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in which the researchers sought to resolve these questions: Are prospective investors being influenced in their investment decisions by the entrepreneurs' description? Should entrepreneurs focus their business pitches on themselves or on their projects? The answer, for some fund seekers,...

Credit: Cristina Gabaldon, US Navy For people in poverty, remembering better times and past success improves their brain functioning by ten IQ points and increases their willingness to seek help from crucial aid services, a new study finds.  In other words, focusing on your past successes not only makes you feel better about yourself, it helps open you up to possible paths to a different, if not better life, and, not so amazingly, increases your IQ.  The findings suggest that reconnecting with your feelings of self-worth reduces the powerful stigma and psychological barriers that make it harder for low-income individuals to make good decisions or access the very assistance services that can help them get back on their feet. "This study shows that surprisingly simple acts of self-affirmation can improve the cognitive function and behavioral outcomes of people in poverty," says University of British Columbia Professor Jiaying Zhao and study co-author. Now, stop and think about ...

An experienced entrepreneur or small business owner understands having to make quick decisions based on incomplete information.  In fact, it's a way of business in small operations where there is rarely time, staff, or resources to research decisions before they must be made. "It turns out there are conditions where using intuition is a good way to make the right decision," said Michael Pratt, of Boston College's Carroll School of Management. "What we found demystifies a lot of the information out there that says intuition isn't as effective as using an analytical approach." Testing intuition against analysis, Pratt and co-authors Erik Dane, of Rice University and Kevin W. Rockmann, of George Mason, found that people can trust their gut and rely on intuition when making a broad evaluation in an area where they have in-depth knowledge of the subject. Intuition has long been viewed as a less effective approach to critical reasoning when compared to the mer...

Are entrepreneurs a self-serving species with their own moral ideas and ethical principles? Media reports about alleged anti-social and delinquent behavior of entrepreneurs are no rarity. Such reports direct the attention towards possibly ’hidden’ anti-social tendencies in entrepreneurial types. Is it true then, that entrepreneurs are all interested in his own benefit and profit and so abandons ethical and social principles? And if so: what makes him so? Researchers from the University of Stockholm  and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (FSU) tried to answer these questions, and came to some surprising conclusions. Data from 1000 Children over 40 Years The psychologists used a Swedish study, ‘Individual Development and Adaptation‘ which followed 1,000 students living in a medium sized Swedish town over a 40-year time period comparing their later entrepreneurial activity with their social behavior earlier in life. The scientists anal...