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Why might some employees sabotage their companies?
The abuse of organisational resources, lying to colleagues, mishandling of confidential data, blackmail, etc - deviant behaviour in the workplace is not just a nuisance, but also a crippling and costly affair, easily reaching billions annually. As it is, business leaders are already saddled with enough worries over the market environment. Tackling deviant behaviour is an extra human resource challenge that most would prefer to go without. Lance Ferris, an organisational behaviour and human resources professor at Singapore Management University, looks at what causes such behaviour: self-esteem, and how managers can address this issue.

Knowledge@SMU Jul 01 - Jul 31

Think outside your box: Enhancing creativity through multicultural interactions
Creative ideas are often the result of two or more seemingly non-overlapping concepts. The more we expose ourselves to diverse experiences, the more likely we might be to sample from a richer pool of ideas, thereby facilitating our creativity, and by extension for some, organisational innovation. This is because experience lowers our resistance and increases our readiness to sample foreign concepts. Angela Leung, a psychology professor at Singapore Management University, notes that while ideas from differing cultural experiences can be recruited as intellectual resources, several factors inhibit our ability to draw on these experiences, thus impeding our creative potential.

Emperors and their John Waynes: Business strategy, inspired by the Wild Wild West!
Large swathes of the Southeast Asian economies have been dominated by some forty Overseas Chinese families. What makes them tick, what are their management philosophies, what are their strategies and how do they view and face up to the business challenges today and tomorrow? George Haley, Usha Haley and Tan Chin Tiong sets to answer these questions and more in their latest collaboration “New Asian Emperors: The Business Strategies of the Overseas Chinese.”

The red, yellow and orange colours of Thai reform
Thailand’s constitution has undergone numerous changes in tandem with the rise and fall of a long line of political players. The shadow of instability lingers. In recent years, two opposing camps have been drawing all the attention: the “yellow” pro-monarchy camp, versus the red-shirt supporters of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. According to Andrew Harding, a visiting law professor at Singapore Management University, the views of the in-betweens, the so-called “orange” camp, which represents the ordinary, nonpartisan Thai citizens, might be the way forward.

Penny for your pint: The tricky art of buying kindness
Do material incentives influence blood donations? A commonly held view is that people donate their blood out of a pro-social motivation. But not everyone is willing to offer their blood for nothing. Material incentives might persuade some to step forward, yet they could very well alienate those who believe that such acts must not be motivated by selfish gains. Indeed, blood banks thread a fine line between motivating the ‘selfish’ and pandering to the ‘selfless’. Economist Alois Stutzer shares the results of a field experiment involving more than 10,000 potential blood donors with Singapore Management University.

Bringing the power of information to life – the case of EMC Corporation
Technology, markets and customer needs are changing. EMC Corporation, which started as a memory board maker thirty years ago, has been changing along. More well-known in the technology industry for its range of hardware used to store data, the company now positions itself as an “information storage vendor”, where software and services plays a greater role. Along with this repositioning, the company is actively managing what the EMC brand stands for, says EMC’s Steven Leonard.