Organizational Neuroscience

The Neuroscience of Organizational Behavior establishes the scientific foundations of organizational neuroscience, a nascent discipline that explores the neural correlates of human behavior in organizations. The book draws from several disciplines including the organizational sciences, neuroeconomics, cognitive psychology, social cognitive neuroscience and neuroscience. The topics discussed include the neural foundations of organizational phenomena, such as decision-making, leadership, fairness, trust and cooperation, emotions, ethics and morality, unconscious bias and diversity in the workplace.

In a very understandable, practical, and accessible manner, this book applies recent groundbreaking findings from behavioral neuroscience to the most complex and vexing challenges in organizations today. In particular, it addresses managing large-scale organizational changes, such as mergers and acquisitions, providing lessons and tactics that can be usefully applied to in many different settings. In addition to discussing successful practices, it also identifies the reasons that most past comprehensive, long-term change projects have failed and unmasks the counterproductive effects of the typical evolutionary or emotion-based attempts to change group and individual behavior, using neuroscience as its principal tool.

Organizational change can be unpredictable and stressful. With a better understanding of what our brains need to focus, organizations can increase employee engagement, productivity and well-being to successfully manage periods of uncertainty. Drawing on the latest scientific research and verified by an independent neuroscientist, Neuroscience for Organizational Change explores the need for social connection at work, how best to manage emotions and reduce bias in decision-making, and why we need communication, involvement and storytelling to help us through change. Practical tips and suggestions can be found throughout, as well as examples of how these insights have been applied at organizations such as Lloyds Banking Group and GCHQ. The book also sets out a practical science-based planning model, SPACES, to enhance engagement. This updated second edition of Neuroscience for Organizational Change contains new chapters on planning the working day with the brain in mind and on overcoming the difficulties related to behavioural change. It also features up-to-the-minute wider content reflecting the latest insights and developments, and updated case studies from the first edition which give a long-term view of the benefits of applying neuroscience in organizations.

This volume aims to introduce organizational researchers and practitioners to the role of neuroscience in building theory, research methodologies and practical applications. The volume introduces the field of organizational neuroscience and explores its influence on topics such as leadership, ethics and moral reasoning.

This e-book brings together scholars in both the neurosciences and organizational sciences who have adopted various approaches to study the cognitive mechanisms mediating the social behavior that we see within organizations. Such an approach has been termed by ourselves, and others, as ‘organisational cognitive neuroscience’. In recent years there has been a veritable increase in studies that have explored the cognitive mechanisms driving such behaviors, and much progress has been made in understanding the neural underpinnings of processes such as financial exchange, risk awareness and even leadership. However, while these studies are informative and add to our understanding of human cognition they fall short of providing evidence-based recommendations for practice. Specifically, we address the broader issue of how the neuroscientific study of such core social behaviors can be used to improve the very way that we work. To address these gaps in our understanding the chapters in this book serve as a platform that allows scholars in both the neurosciences and the organizational sciences to highlight the work that spans across these two fields. The consolidation of these two fields also serves to highlight the utility of a singular organizational cognitive neuroscience. This is a fundamentally important outcome of the book as the application of neuroscience to address economically relevant behaviors has seen a variety of fields evolve in their own right, such as neuromarketing, neuroeconomics and so forth. The use of neuro-scientific technologies,in particular fMRI, has indeed led to a bewildering (and somewhat suffocating) proliferation of new approaches, however, the speed of such developments demands that we must proceed carefully with such ventures or risk some fundamental mistakes. The book that you now hold will consolidates these new neuroscience based approaches and in doing so highlight the importance of this approach in helping us to understand human social behavior in general. Taken together the chapters provide a framework for scholars within the neurosciences who wish to explore the further the opportunities that the study of organisational behavior may provide.

Organizational communication is at a crossroads and professional communicators and leaders alike need to up their game. In this insightful and practical guide, leadership psychologist Dr. Laura McHale shows how neuroscience can help, surveying the field to reveal the science that is most applicable to organizations and providing an evidence-based approach to dramatically boost the effectiveness and impact of communications. From structural dynamics to occupational aprosodia, from the threat (and opportunities) of GPT-3 to the neuroscience of Zoom fatigue, she takes the reader on a fascinating journey of how neuroscience can help unlock the potential of communicators and the organizations they work for.

An Introduction to Applied Behavioral Neuroscience explores the connection between neuroscience and multiple domains, including psychological disorders, forensics, education, consumer behavior, economics, leadership, health, and robotics and artificial intelligence. The book ensures students have a solid foundation in the history of behavioral neuroscience; its applicability to other facets of science and policy, and a good understanding of major methodologies and their limitations to aiding critical thinking skills. Written in a student-friendly style, it provides a highly accessible introduction to the major structural and functional features of the human nervous system. It then discusses applications across a variety of areas in society, including how behavioral neuroscience is used by the legal system, in educational practice, advertising, economics, leadership, the development of and recovery from health challenges, and in robotics. Each of the application-specific chapters present the problems that neuroscience is being asked to address, the methods being used, and the challenges and successes experienced by scholars and practitioners in each domain. It is a must-read for all advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in biological psychology, neuroscience, and clinical psychology who want to know what neuroscience can really do to address real-world problems.

Understanding and improving how organizations work and are managed is the object of management research and practice, and this topic is of longstanding interest in the academia and in society at large. More recently, the contribution that the study of the brain could make to, notably, our understanding of decisions, emotional reactions, and behaviors has led to the emergence of the field of “organizational neuroscience”. Within the field of management, organizational neuroscience seeks to explore linkages between neuroscience research, theories, and methods and management research. Its primary goal is to incorporate findings on the cognitive processes underlying the thoughts, behaviors and attitudes of organizational actors in order to better inform management theories, and to assist in understanding, predicting and improving these behaviors in the workplace. As a result, we have seen in the last decade a flurry of research projects and publications in organizational neuroscience, as well as novel or rejuvenated innovations around neuromarketing, neuroleadership, and cognitive enhancement in the work place, to name a few. However, research and practical applications in organizational neuroscience pose profound ethical challenges about, for example, organizational responsibility in the responsible use of scientific innovation. Drawing on recent debates in the field, and in response to upcoming ethical challenges of organization neuroscience, this book introduces “organizational neuroethics” as an emerging interdisciplinary field that addresses the ethics of organizational neuroscience research and applications, as well as the neuroscience of organizational ethics. The first part focuses on the ethics of organizational neuroscience and several chapters tackle the ethics of neuromarketing or neuroleadership and discuss the ethical issues associated with neuroenhancement practice in the workplace. The second part of the book addresses cutting-edge topics in the neuroscience of organizational ethics. Written by international experts in the fields of management, neuroscience, ethics, and social science, this book will be of prime interest to practitioners, researchers and students in the various fields concerned with improving management research and practices, as well as organizational ethics.