Charter Workplace Summit

A paradox of brokerage: alter distrust, network self-promotion, and the willingness to accept referrals from brokers

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes — University College London, Bocconi University

Brokers positioned across structural holes are well placed to refer disconnected people to each other, yet those same networks undermine the trust recipients need before accepting a referral; network self-promotion partly resolves the paradox, substituting for reputational cues where shared contacts cannot supply them. Evidence spans a field study and two experiments. For consultants: a broad network can itself breed distrust, so advertise your matchmaking competence deliberately when brokering introductions between organizations.

Performance Manipulation as a Reaction to the Prevalence of Gossip: The Role of the Self‐Monitoring Trait

Contemporary Accounting Research — KU Leuven, École Supérieure des Sciences Économiques et Commerciales

Gossip is usually cast as informal discipline that deters misconduct, but two field surveys and an experiment find a second channel running the other way: where gossip about peers' performance is prevalent, employees fear negative social evaluation and inflate their reported performance to protect their social image. The effect is weaker for high self-monitors, who manage impressions through other means. For consultants: a gossip-heavy culture can quietly corrupt the performance data itself, which matters for any client running self-reported metrics or peer-visible dashboards.

Cultural conformity reverses the effectiveness of trust-based management: an Ising-inspired model of the Care-Dare dilemma

Frontiers in Physics — The University of Tokyo

Whether investing in trust before demanding performance beats static management policies depends on culture: in an agent-based model of the Care-Dare dilemma, cultural conformity can reverse the effectiveness of trust-based management. Agents update their behavior from the care and dare actions they receive, since people observe behavior but not latent dispositions. For consultants: trust-first strategies are not universal, and in highly conformist cultures the sequencing of care and challenge deserves explicit testing.

The Happy Manifesto

Henry Stewart

Management 3.0 — Happiness at Work

Management 3.0

The Next Big Idea

Rufus Griscom