Business & Entrepreneurship

Words company officials use in quarterly earnings calls with investors and analysts can be telling. An Olin Business School researcher and co-authors conducted a detailed, machine-learning study of such earnings calls.

In a study co-authored by a Washington University in St. Louis business researcher, a survey that began with Generation X college students in 1992 and revisited when they were around age 41 finds that overall narcissism declined over time — as did the three narcissism components: vanity, leadership and entitlement.

Pamela Meyer, BA ’80, is founder and CEO of Calibrate, a corporate training company that specializes in deception detection. She is author of the 2010 book Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception, and her 2011 Ted Talk, “How to Spot a Liar,” has more than 22 million views. Here she talks about deciphering deception.

CEOs belonging to the Business Roundtable publicly committed to corporate responsibility to society as a whole, “a huge statement from one of the most influential groups in American business,” says a Washington University in St. Louis expert in values-based business.

Dishonest deeds diminish a person’s ability to read others’ emotions, or “interpersonal cognition,” finds a new study from four researchers, including one from the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Another finding: dishonesty breeds “a vicious cycle.”

A new paper, authored by Washington University in St. Louis faculty and alumni from Olin Business School, reports findings from five different studies of subjects in a negotiation agreement. The takeaway: inorganic anger generally leaves parties of both parts feeling guilty, distrusted and needing to make amends afterward.

Researchers, including a postdoctoral fellow at Olin Business School, have studied where potential relationship problems exist between managers and employees who are close, and how to avoid such pitfalls.

Schoolwide efforts are among the threads weaved into the fabric of an Olin Business School MBA program ranked No. 4 in the world for women, according to a Financial Times analysis — placing it behind only Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley among U.S. universities, and China’s Shanghai Jiao Tong, but just ahead of Harvard.

You might expect that a boss who cracks jokes is healthy for the workplace, while a boss who blows his stack isn’t. As it turns out, according to Olin Business School research, the opposite might be true — depending on the circumstances.

It’s possible the Keebler Elves aren’t as happy at work as they seem. Or SpongeBob SquarePants’ dour fast-food colleague Squidward might be a little cheerier than he lets on. New research from Olin Business School shows that people working in customer-facing companies, such as retailers (or cartoon burger joints), tend to be happier at work, while workers for companies further removed — manufacturing, for example (or treehouse cookie factories) — tend to be less happy.