Organizations can gain a powerful competitive advantage by tapping into their talent and learning how to effectively organize and lead it. But, according to Professor Edward Lawler in Talent: Making People Your Competitive Advantage, although many organizations acknowledge the importance of people, most do little or nothing to make them a source of competitive advantage.
Research and Insights Archive
Research and Insights from the Center for Effective Organizations
Available Content
Creating American Businesses that Can Compete Globally
James O’Toole (CEO) and Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) argue that American companies increasingly outsource and offshore jobs, cut employee benefits, substitute contingent or contract workers for regular or permanent employees, eliminate traditional career paths, and reduce expenditures on training.
Built for Talent
Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) shares that survey after survey has found that executives believe finding and developing the right talent should be one of their top priorities and that their company’s human resources are one of their most important assets.
Beyond HR: The New Science of Human Capital
Beyond HR (John W. Boudreau and Peter M. Ramstad (Harvard Business School Press, 2007)) shows how organizations can uncover distinctive talent contributions, strategically differentiate their HR practices and metrics, and more optimally allocate talent to create value.
What if – Organizations Were Built for Talent?
Edward E. Lawler III (CEO) explains that for at least the last decade, it’s been hard to pick up a business book, article, or corporate annual report without seeing statements that stress the importance of human capital— people.
Measuring and Maximizing the Business Impact of Executive Coaching
This article by Alec R. Levenson (CEO) addresses the conceptual and methodological issues involved in measuring the business impact of executive coaching.
Crafting a Path Toward Mastery: Turning a Personal Leadership Development Plan into Something
Morgan W. McCall, Jr. (USC) attempts to describe an alternative approach to creating a personal plan for developing leadership ability.
Developing the Expert Leader
In this article, Morgan W. McCall, Jr. (USC) and George P. Hollenbeck (Hollenbeck and Associates) look at leadership through the lens of expertise and relate the findings of a wide range of research on experts, expertise, and expert performance to how we think about leaders and leadership development.
Is Expatriation Good for My Career? The Impact of Expatriate Assignments on Perceived and Actual Career Outcomes
This study by George S. Benson (University of Texas) and Marshall Pattie (Towson University) examines the impact of expatriate assignments on career growth and the external marketability of U.S. employees of a large professional services firm.
The Impact of Social Capital on the Development of Transactive Memories Multilevel Group Knowledge Systems
In this paper by Yu Connie Yuan (Cornell University), Peter Monge, and Janet Fulk, a multilevel, multi-theoretical model of transactive memory theory was developed by integrating the emergence model with social capital theories.
The Strength of Occupation Indicators as Proxy for Skill
In this paper, Alec R. Levenson (CEO) and Cindy Zoghi (US Bureau of Labor Statistics) consider whether inter-occupational wage differentials that are unexplained by measured human capital are indeed due to differences in often-unmeasured skill.
Measuring the Productivity of Software Development in a Globally Distributed Company
Alec R. Levenson (CEO) discusses how the trend toward outsourcing that has been emblazoned in the headlines and covers of newspapers and magazines in recent years started with software development.