Beginning Business Blog

This study brings up an interesting point, especially when combined with a reading of current research that documents that women generally make better small business owners and managers than do men ~ in that women operated businesses tend to be more profitable and live longer. Dance is stereotyped as a female activity, and some of the newest management training programs work at teaching those skills that women typically are stronger at.  Empathy, fostering teamwork, gathering a wide range of input before making decisions, and now dance.  Something anyone thinking of starting a business should consider. C ould managers gain a new kind of understanding about their interaction with colleagues and employees by ‘dancing’?  That's the question arising from new research. Management is usually considered a stiff and rational business, decisions made based on fiscal studies, profit margins and market forces. However, researchers have studied whether creative movement ('danc...

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...

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 competen...

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 ...

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 y...

R earchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) in Boston, Massachusetts, have found that exposure to short wavelength blue light during the biological day directly and immediately improves alertness and performance. Blue Light has an "Alerting" Effect "Our previous research has shown that blue light is able to improve alertness during the night, but our new data demonstrates that these effects also extend to daytime light exposure," said Shadab Rahman, PhD, a researcher in BWH's Division of Sleep Medicine and lead author of this study. "These findings demonstrate that prolonged blue light exposure during the day has an an alerting effect." Suggested Reading Click on image In order to determine which wavelengths of light were most effective in warding off fatigue, the BWH researchers teamed with George Brainard, PhD, a professor of neurology at Thomas Jefferson University, who developed the specialized light equipment used in t...

Source: personal.psu.edu   C old and flu season is here, and with it the economic impact of employees either missing work or worse, going into work when ill and then spreading their illness to co-workers and customers alike. Recommended Reading Click on image The common cold is well, common, affecting adults approximately 2-3 times a year and children under age 2 approximately 6 times a year. Symptoms such as sore throat, stuffy or runny nose, cough and malaise are usually worse in days 1-3 and can last 7-10 days, sometimes as long as 3 weeks. "Although self-limiting, the common cold is highly prevalent and may be debilitating. It causes declines in function and productivity at work and may affect other activities such as driving," write Drs. Michael Allan, Department of Family Medicine, University of Alberta, Edmonton, and Bruce Arroll, Department of General Practice and Primary Health Care, University of Auckland, New Zealand. Colds are costly It is estimat...