Your company under behavioural scrutiny

The Life: Mauro Guillen, director of the US-based Lauder Insitute, Dr Felix Zandman Professor of International Management, speaks about the best way to encourage creativity in teams and repairing banks' reputations.

Mauro Guillén is a professor of international management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Delores Johnson / The National

Organisational behaviourists have a wide remit, covering subjects as diverse as employee creativity and how companies operate. During a recent trip to the Emirates, Mauro Guillén, a professor of international management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, discussed encouraging creativity in teams and how companies can repair their reputations.

What does an organisational behaviourist look at?

All sorts of things. You go from the very macro to more detailed things.

Let's start with the small stuff. Is there a right or a wrong way to manage a team of employees?

It really depends on what you want to accomplish. Some people think about it in terms of what a leader should do. What leaders should do is give clear parameters or indications about what the team is supposed to accomplish, with the team members waiting for the leader to say 'this is where we're going and this is how we are going to accomplish it'. But some people say that's going to stifle creativity.

So what is the best way to encourage creativity?

What research has found is that very homogenous teams, where everybody is the same, tend not to produce very creative outputs. But one which is very diverse and includes men and women … or people with different kinds of life experiences, then that is more likely to produce creative results.

Are there any others?

[Another] is to have a more participatory or more decentralised, more diffuse leadership style. I think it is generally true if what you are trying to accomplish is creativity. If you are trying to accomplish cleaning all the rooms in the hotel, which may require some creativity, but not that much, then you're better off with a different model.

On the macro side, how has the economic instability over the last few years affected companies' reputations?

I think by far the biggest change has been the legitimacy of all sorts of organisations, especially banks, of course. But not only them. I think governments, international agencies and corporations in general now have a much worse reputation than they used to. And then internally they have changed.

How?

For example, they have had to change some of their internal pay systems for executives. They have become leaner, probably meaner as well … That is an old phrase. It was coined in the 1980s, but then came the 1990s and things were going OK … I think the phrase got forgotten, but I think the age of the leaner and meaner organisation is back. It has become a new norm of behaviour.

What do banks need to do to improve their reputation?

In many parts of the world, banks continue to be burdened by bad assets. They have liquidity problems and all sorts of constraints on their behaviour. There's new regulation, so what they are doing is trying to extract more money out of their customers to be more profitable … Financial institutions will need to go through a slow, painstaking process of rebuilding their reputation as well as their ability to do business. Their reputation loss has been enormous over the last few years, and you cannot rebuild overnight. It takes a while.

* Gillian Duncan