Use Social Influences to Be a Better Manager

Insights by Stanford Business, August 18, 2016

by Theodore Kinni

When Jonah Berger was a PhD student at Stanford Graduate School of Business, he biked through Palo Alto, slipping surveys under the windshield wipers of BMWs. He wanted to compare why owners bought their Beamers to why they thought others bought theirs. Berger discovered that BMW owners assumed other owners were strongly influenced by the social cachet associated with the luxury brand, while they themselves believed they were influenced by more rational and practical reasons.

Berger, who is now an associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, dives into this theme in his new book, Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces That Shape Behavior. “It’s hard to find a decision or behavior that isn’t affected by other people,” he says. “In fact, looking across all domains of our lives, there is only one place we don’t seem to see social influence — ourselves.”

In Invisible Influence, Berger helps us understand how we are affected personally by the sometimes contradictory forces of social influence, and how managers can use these influences to more effectively lead others. Read the rest here

TechSavvy: Does Social Media Enhance Employee Productivity?

MIT Sloan Management Review, July 7, 2016

by Theodore Kinni


Do you know what your employees are doing online? Come next May, Singaporean prime minister Lee Hsien Loong won’t have any trouble answering that question. That’s when 100,000 computers used by the city-state’s civil servants will be disconnected from the Internet. The government is taking this drastic action to “tighten security,” writes tech editor Irene Tham in The Straits Times.

Being of a cynical bent, I think that eliminating employee access to Facebook and Twitter and other social media platforms might give Singapore’s government a nice bump in productivity, too. But I might be wrong, according to a report from the Pew Research Center that delves into the use of social media in the workplace.

“Today’s workers incorporate social media into a wide range of activities while on the job,” explain Pew Center researcher Kenneth Olmstead and University of Michigan School of Information professors Cliff Lampe and Nicole Ellison. “Some of these activities are explicitly professional or job-related, while others are more personal in nature.”

Sure, their survey says — ding! — that the number one reason why American workers use social media at work (34% of respondents) is “to take a mental break from their job.” Moreover, reason number two (27% of respondents) is to “connect with friends and family while at work.” But then comes a list that might make your inner CEO perk up a bit: 24% of the respondents use social media at work to foster professional connections; 20% to help them solve work problems; 17% to foster relationships with co-workers and/or learn more about them; and 12% to ask work-related questions of people outside their organization and/or inside their organization.

So, maybe your company shouldn’t follow Singapore’s lead. Anyway, aren’t all those civil servants simply gonna go all Hillary Clinton with their personal devices? Read the rest here