Corporate Rebels Summit 2026

When Is It Fairer to Allocate Resources for Training to Lower Performing Versus Higher Performing Employees?

Journal of Accounting Research — The University of Texas at Austin, Emory University

Managers splitting scarce training budgets face a fairness trap that depends on context, not on the allocation itself. In an interactive experiment, employees judged the same decision by the prevailing norm: where egalitarian norms dominated, as when people had little control over their tasks, lower performers treated training as their due and reacted badly when it went to top performers, while meritocratic norms reversed the reaction. For consultants: before advising where development money goes, read which fairness norm the environment has installed, because task autonomy shifts the norm itself.

Can Nonprofits Gain an Advantage in Employee Retention Through Management Practices? A Comparative Lens for Managing Nonprofit Versus for‐Profit Employees

Personnel Psychology — Chinese University of Hong Kong, University of Florida

Nonprofits may hold a structural retention edge over for-profits, but only when they install employee-centered management practices: benefits, participation and training. Across four studies, including archival Statistics Canada survey data, nonprofit employees rated their organizations more positively than for-profit employees did when the organization implemented more of these practices, consistent with the theory that mission-driven settings convert them into firm-specific attachment. For consultants: participation and training are not generic retention levers; their pull depends on the kind of organization that hosts them, so calibrate the retention playbook to sector before copying it across clients.

Odd One Out: A Configural Perspective on Team Mental Models

Small Group Research — Erasmus University Rotterdam, Film Independent

Cognitive isolation, where one team member holds a task mental model dissimilar from everyone else's, undermined performance in a study of 79 student teams running a business simulation, but only when member epistemic motivation was low. Average alignment can mask a single outlier whose divergent understanding drags results. For consultants: when diagnosing a struggling self-managed team, look for the odd one out in how members understand the task, not just overall agreement.

Leadermorphosis

Lisa Gill

Brave New Work

Aaron Dignan & Rodney Evans

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review