Entries for July 2007

Does mood matter in the workplace? Do cranky bosses make employees more or less productive? Is it better, in other words, to be feared or loved?

All of these questions are answered in a new study by Sigal Barsade, an associate professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, and Donald Gibson, an associate professor of management at Fairfield University's Dolan School of Business. In their paper, "Why Does Affect Matter in Organizations?" recently published in Academy of Management Perspectives, the two scholars examine more than a decade of research dealing with mood and emotion in the workplace—and their findings are utterly devastating to devotees of the fear-mongering school of management.

Entrepreneurial success is often chalked up to being first to market, or having the lowest prices or the best customer service. But what about the management team: Does who's running a start-up make any difference in whether it succeeds? It's a question investors make a point of asking—anyone who has presented to a group of venture capitalists can attest to that—but there is surprisingly little research on how much impact the management team has on a start-up's chances of going public.

Until now, that is. In "Early Team: The Impact of Team Demography on VC Financing and Going Public," published in a recent issue of the Journal of Business Venturing, three business school professors from the University of California-Irvine and the Stanford Graduate School of Business examine how different kinds of management teams at 170 Silicon Valley start-ups performed between 1994 and 2002. The paper highlights some characteristics most highly correlated with success.

Rumors of the death of the mom-and-pop may have been greatly exaggerated. There are 22 million businesses in the United States with five or fewer employees. Together, they produce more than $1 trillion in annual revenues. Major credit card companies and banks have descended on the sector, jostling to get the business of small business, and several—American Express and Discover Card, most notably—have begun publishing regular surveys examining this corner of Main Street.