Tag: Andrew Knight

Olin’s Andrew Knight is featured in a conversation with Poets & Quants on “Who Should & Who Should Not Apply For An MBA.”

Knight is vice dean for education and globalization and professor of organizational behavior. He spoke about when an MBA makes the most sense, what the degree still does well, and when to consider other paths for business education.

“I think one of the key factors that comes into play is what the person is looking for,” Knight said. “Someone who’s looking to broaden their generalist skill set, and who has aspirations of really being a leader of people in the long term in their careers, is probably better suited for an MBA.

“Versus someone who really has a hunger to deepen their technical skill set and become the equivalent of the functional or technical guru in a given area. That’s the most basic differentiation where you would see people funneling into those different paths.”

For nearly 20 years, Andrew Knight has been interested in unobtrusive research methods. A professor of organizational behavior, he’s passionate about learning how people can best work with one another, and his current focus is on improving people’s virtual collaborations.

Knight used the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 as a spark for packaging something he’d been experimenting with to analyze photos and video recordings.

The result: a new, free software named zoomGroupStats.

“With teaching shifting to a virtual realm and a pressing need to understand virtual collaboration, I was motivated to accelerate the development of this software,” he said.

The package is to enable researchers to use the virtual meetings platform Zoom to collect data that illuminates how people interact with one another, Knight said. With it, users can quickly turn files downloaded from Zoom into datasets, analyze the dynamics of spoken and text conversations in virtual meetings, and extract information from the video feeds of virtual meetings.

Who do you imagine using this software? And for what?

The first category is researchers. The software is currently designed especially for researchers who study teamwork, negotiations, interpersonal relationships and group dynamics. However, the basic functionality of the library would be useful to anyone who wants to extract insights into conversation dynamics and emotion during virtual meetings.

The second category is teachers running virtual classes. The software can provide insights into who is engaged in the conversation during a class (i.e., class participation) and the ways in which people are making contributions (e.g., vocal contributions, text-based chat contributions).

The third category is leaders and managers who conduct virtual meetings. When paired with a web application that I created (http://meetingmeasures.com), the software can give leaders feedback on how effectively they facilitate virtual meetings. 

How easy are the tools to use?

When paired with the step-by-step tutorial that I created (http://zoomgroupstats.org/), I hope the library is accessible for anyone with a basic level of proficiency with the open source statistics software R. Some elements of the functionality—such as the capacity to read the emotional expressions of people’s faces through their cameras—requires an additional level of proficiency in setting up and configuring Amazon Web Services. 

What are the privacy concerns with this software?

Like any use of recorded human behavior, users must take into account privacy considerations. In a way, the privacy concerns for research are equivalent to more traditional methods (e.g., having human research assistants rate and classify people’s behavior from a video recording). However, people have variant perspectives on software-based “automatic” coding compared to human-based coding of their behavior. As a general rule, anytime a meeting is being recorded, a meeting leader should explicitly request permission to record from all meeting participants.

How have you used your software?

I’ve used this for research and teaching purposes so far. On the research side, I have primarily been working to validate a set of metrics that can be automatically derived from a virtual meeting vis-à-vis traditional, survey-based metrics. This is important to situate the automatic metrics within the current landscape of research on interpersonal relations and group dynamics.

On the teaching side, I have used this software in combination with my Meeting Measures web application to give students feedback on their virtual meetings. This is helpful for showing students when, for example, they dominate the conversation or make inadequate contributions to their team meetings. 

So the software is free?

Yes. The R package is free and open source. It is available through the web-based repository (Comprehensive R Archive Network, or CRAN) that is used to distribute packages for R. 

Top photo: Professor Andrew Knight teaches a hybrid course in September 2020 in Emerson Auditorium. In front of him, socially distanced students site in the auditorium, while behind, students participating remotely appear on screen.

Combatting cybersecurity threats. Guiding space exploration. Developing novel healthcare management systems. Major business and government innovations often rely on multiteam systems, or teams of teams.

But when people work within such systems, known as MTSs, they face challenges. An MTS is a nebulous organization of component teams of specialists that link together to accomplish a broad and overarching objective. That objective exceeds the capacity of any one person or team.

Andrew Knight, Olin professor of organizational behavior, researched the challenges people face when working within team of teams. Specifically, he delved into how the component teams can best coordinate their activities—both within and between teams—to achieve the overarching goals of the whole system.

In the past, scholarship had advanced a perspective that informal modes of coordination—such as informal, interpersonal interactions between MTS members—undermine MTS effectiveness because of their complexity.

A channel for the flow of information

But that view is pessimistic and flawed, Knight and his coauthors argue. Drawing from theory and their research, they derived important implications for those who must lead an MTS.

“Informal interpersonal interactions actually can enable coordination by serving as a channel for the flow of information and a means by which MTS members can mutually adjust their work,” Knight said.

But whether informal coordination helps or hinders MTS functioning depends on how much time team members spend interacting with other members of their own component team, relative to the time that they spend interacting with the members of other teams.

“Members must balance their informal interactions,” Knight said.

Knight discussed his research at a virtual event September 29 as part of Olin’s Business Research Series.

“Our analysis underscores that leaders must carefully manage MTS members’ informal coordination efforts,” he said. Too much time spent focused internally—on coordinating with the members of one’s own component team— detracts from system performance. But too much time spent focused externally—toward other component teams in the system—breeds intrateam conflict that disrupts team performance.

It’s about balance

“To maximize system performance, which is ultimately the most important objective, leaders must ensure that team members balance their allocation of time between the local team and the more global system,” he said.

Knight and his coauthors present their findings in “Performance tensions in multiteam systems: Balancing informal mechanisms of coordination within and between teams,” in press at the Academy of Management Journal. Coauthors are Jonathan C. Ziegert and Christian J. Resickof Drexel University and Katrina A. Graham of Suffolk University.

In addition to his position as a professor, Knight is associate dean of WashU at Brookings and academic director of Olin Lifelong Learning. His areas of expertise are entrepreneurship, leadership, team development and diversity, and his research interests include virtual work, people analytics, collaboration and relationships.

See Knight’s presentation here.

A high-performing team is the holy grail of leadership. But how do you build a strong team in practice? The beauty of Olin’s Executive MBA program is the abundance of opportunities to learn, apply, and practice team-building skills.

Executive MBA alumni Eric Willis and Ali Ahmadi, EMBA Academic Director Lee Konczak, and Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior Andrew Knight summarize some of the more salient lessons about team-building from the Executive MBA program and their professional lives:

A Shared Purpose

As part of the Leadership Residency, Lee Konczak, academic director of the Executive MBA Program and senior lecturer on organizational behavior and leadership development, administers a team development survey to measure how well the student teams function.

The assessment is Olin’s way “of defining for EMBA teams what a good team looks like,” Konczak said. “Teams do better when they have shared goals, plan ahead, and communicate. In some cases, it’s obvious when teams aren’t on the same page using this assessment.”

According to Konczak, commitment to a shared purpose and a willingness to plan are the two most important team-building takeaways for executives in the program.

Diversity of Perspectives and Experience

Eric Willis, EMBA 43, was a senior brand manager when he started the EMBA Program. He was promoted to a brand director during the program and is now director of marketing at Nestlé Purina Petcare. For him, the team-building aspect of the Executive MBA Program was an opportunity to practice skills he’d learned at Nestlé with a completely different and diverse group of professionals.

“One of the things I loved most about the EMBA program was that it was such a diverse group of people with different points of view and different backgrounds, all coming together in one place,” Willis said. “On your team, you’ve got to figure out how to leverage everyone’s strengths to achieve a common goal.”

At Nestlé Purina, Willis regularly brings groups of disparate team members together, including finance and product development participants, to agree on mission and vision. Some of the challenges include developing trust, addressing different sets of values, and communication.

“To me, building a strong team means getting diversity of thought. It means respecting people’s different points of view,” he said. “When I think of building a strong team, I think of empowering people to make decisions, and I think of leveraging what everybody brings to the table and trying to find a way to use everybody’s different perspectives to reach a common goal.”

An Environment of Trust and Respect

Entrepreneurship is an area in which building strong teams—and building them early—is critical. As an EMBA student, Ali Ahmadi, EMBA 44, leapt fully into entrepenreurship, co-founding drone 3D software startup “Strayos” (formerly AirZaar), with a fellow student. He knows firsthand how important it is that teams work well when the stakes are high and the rewards are not guaranteed.

“Early stage founders often don’t realize that the idea or product is not the only factor motivating the talent; it’s also the willingness to follow their leader into an environment where the odds are stacked against them in succeeding,” he says. “When you build a team that trusts and respects you as a leader, they will go through a wall of fire to reach the common goal but if the trust and respect are neglected, then very little can be done to salvage it,” he says.

Be Open to Feedback

Andrew Knight, associate professor of organizational behavior at Olin, finds that one of the biggest roadblocks for entrepreneurs is cultivating and developing a sense of shared ownership—“not in an equity sense,” Knight said, “but in terms of the feeling of ownership that the team members have over the venture. There is kind of an asymmetry in people’s investment in the project at the outset.”

Knight suggests leaders invite input from those joining the team, while at the same time creating boundaries: “Encourage new team members to make contributions and suggest changes to the venture, but pair that with clearly communicating where the entrepreneur is less willing to make changes.”

This clarity—inviting input within a mutually understood structure—“applies in almost any creative team where there is a need to get people feeling ownership—especially implementation and innovation,” Knight said.

The importance of this delicate balance is supported by recent research by Knight and Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior Markus Baer, who identified three behaviors of successful lead entrepeneurs in the earliest stages of a venture.

“Millennials in the workplace” is a big topic among non-millennials—both in the media and at work. So we tapped Andrew Knight, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior, to shed some light on his research regarding this intriguing generation. He presented his findings in a recent webinar, identifying three trends that organizations are facing:

1. Millennials are difficult to retain.

2. Millennials prize their personal lives over their work lives.

3. Millennials want opportunities to grow and develop.

I don’t think that anyone would argue that #2 and #3 aren’t positive or even natural from generation to generation. So let’s focus on the “difficult to retain” trend. Why? First off, millennials identify less and less with institutions, religion, and even voting. So they certainly aren’t going to drink the company Kool-Aid easily! They are always open to new endeavors and don’t readily choose to stay with a current employer for long. They want opportunities and they want to “work to live” (not necessarily the other way around). And when millennials work, they want to work in a less rigid environment, with plenty of mentoring and coaching along the way.

Millennials are often accused of being “entitled”  and “narcissistic.” However, as Professor Knight pointed out, every American generation has been called the “most narcissistic” to date. And many of the measures which ladder up to the label of narcissistic—”self-esteem,” “drive,” and “persistence”—also build up to being a leader, which isn’t a bad thing.

So how do we best embrace and nurture the Millennial generation? Professor Knight shared some key thoughts to this point:

1. Avoid stereotyping millennials as “entitled.”

2. Recognize that this generation is the most diverse generation in history.

3. Offer career opportunities within an organization, even if a promotion is not available or appropriate. Consider a geographic, functional, or divisional change.

4. Redefine rigid roles and rules to address the fact that millennials value their personal lives more than their work lives. Consider flexible time, flexible roles, or a flexible location policy.

5. Give the “annual” review more often than once a year. Millennials are hungry to grow and develop; they want coaching, ongoing feedback and opportunities.

Millennials are here to stay, and managers need to think about how to better structure positions and policies to better attract, develop, and keep this pool of talent.

Be sure to check out the “Managing the Millennial Wave” seminar scheduled for February 2018, as well as our other management and leadership offerings. 

How millennial are you? Check out the Pew Center’s 14-question quiz.