Business & Entrepreneurship

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.

You — as part of the 10 percent of the American population who participates in this form of technically illegal gambling — have a 1-in-9.2 quintillion chance of picking the perfect March Madness bracket, says a statistical expert from Washington University in St. Louis.

In the first big-data study combining objective medical and compensation records with demographics, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and Aarhus University in Denmark discovered once a company switches to a pay-for-performance process, the number of employees using anxiety and depression medication increased by 5.7 percent over an existing base rate of 5.2 percent.

A growing number of first-year students are seeking career advice and resources early in their college careers. In response, the Career Center has launched a number of new career-readiness program specifically for first-year students. The center also collaborated with Arts & Sciences on a pilot program that combines career planning and academic advising.  

When 800,000 government employees eventually return to work after a shutdown that started Dec. 22, expect them to work less efficiently — or, at minimum, feel less engaged and far less respected, says an expert in government leadership and organizational strategy at Olin Business School.

Experts across campus offer advice about how to build your professional network and connect better with colleagues

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.

Joyce Trimuel, EMBA ’16, has always seen her career advancement as a chance to help others. Now, as the diversity and inclusion officer for CNA, she’s making its corporate culture more inclusive.

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.

Hillary Anger Elfenbein, an organizational behavior expert, studies emotions in the workplace — how easy they are to miss or misinterpret, and how they impact performance.