Why groups of competent people produce incompetent outcomes.
11 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Netflix Culture: Freedom & Responsibility
Reed Hastings & Patty McCord · 2009
Argues a company should deliberately avoid process and control as it grows, instead hiring only fully-formed adults, paying top of market, and being…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B
Steven Kerr · 1975
Catalogues cases across business, medicine, war and sport where organisations pay for one behaviour while claiming to want a different one, and…
Primary sources and full treatments.
Frontiers in Group Dynamics
Kurt Lewin · 1947
Proposes that lasting organisational change requires three stages, unfreezing existing behaviour, moving to a new state and refreezing it, arguing…
+6 more at this level
11 works
Reed Hastings & Patty McCord
Argues a company should deliberately avoid process and control as it grows, instead hiring only fully-formed adults, paying top of market, and being candid about performance, trading control for freedom on the bet that responsible people repay it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Talya Bauer & Berrin Erdogan
Surveys how individual differences, group processes and organisational structure jointly shape behaviour at work, treating organisational behaviour as an applied science rather than a set of management maxims.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Google re:Work
Reports that a team's internal dynamics, psychological safety chief among them, predicted its performance far better than who was on it, based on Google's own internal study of over 180 teams.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Steven Kerr
Catalogues cases across business, medicine, war and sport where organisations pay for one behaviour while claiming to want a different one, and argues the reward system, not stated intentions, is what people actually respond to.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Kurt Lewin
Proposes that lasting organisational change requires three stages, unfreezing existing behaviour, moving to a new state and refreezing it, arguing change fails when the last step is skipped and the old pattern reasserts itself.
Herbert Simon
Argues complex systems that evolve or endure are almost always built from nearly-decomposable hierarchies of stable subsystems, because coordinating everything with everything is too costly for either evolution or design to sustain.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jay Galbraith
Treats organisational structure as a response to how much information must be processed to coordinate a task, so that uncertainty, not size, determines whether a hierarchy needs lateral relations or self-contained units.
link checked 17 Sept 2026J. Richard Hackman & Greg Oldham
Proposes that five core job characteristics — skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback — determine intrinsic motivation through three psychological states, and tests the model against real jobs rather than lab tasks.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Amy Edmondson
Argues teams learn from mistakes only when members believe they will not be punished or embarrassed for speaking up, and shows this belief, not team composition, predicts whether a team actually catches and corrects its errors.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Carsten De Dreu & Laurie Weingart
Finds across many studies that task conflict, not just relationship conflict, damages team performance and satisfaction, contradicting the once-common claim that disagreement over ideas is harmless or even useful.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Nicholas Bloom, James Liang, John Roberts & Zhichun Jenny Ying
Randomly assigns call-centre employees to work from home and finds a 13% performance increase, driven by fewer breaks and sick days and a quieter working environment, alongside higher attrition among the least suited to it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026