Adam Grant
 | This article contains content that is written like an advertisement. (January 2014) |
Adam Grant | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | August 13, 1981 |
| Occupation | Writer, professor |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | U.S. |
| Alma mater | |
| Genre | Prosocial Motivation, Success, Business, Education, Psychology, Interpersonal Relations, Economics |
| Notable works | Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success (April 9, 2013) |
| Website | |
| http://giveandtake.com/ | |
Adam Grant is a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success (Viking Press, 2013). He is widely considered to be one of the most influential thought leaders of his generation.
Grant has been recognized as both the youngest tenured and most highly rated professor at the Wharton School.[1]
Academic career
Grant is the youngest tenured professor at Wharton[2] and a leading expert on success, work motivation, and helping and giving behaviors. He earned his Ph.D. in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan, completing it in less than three years, and his B.A. from Harvard University, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.[3] In 2012, Grant was the single highest-rated professor at Wharton.
Grant has presented for leaders at organizations such as Google, the NFL, Merck, Pixar, Goldman Sachs, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, The United Nations, The World Economic Forum, and the US Army, the US Navy, and the US Air Force. He writes regularly about work and psychology as a LinkedIn Influencer.
Grant's research has been featured in bestselling books, including Quiet by Susan Cain, Drive and To Sell Is Human by Daniel Pink, and The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor, as well as hundreds of media outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, USA Today, The Financial Times, Oprah magazine, and the Freakonomics blog.
His call center study has been credited with changing perspectives on workplace motivation.[4] In 2011, Fortune Magazine named him one of the Top 40 Business Professors Under 40.[5] BusinessWeek then named Grant one of their favorite professors in 2012,[6] and Susan Cain cited Grant's research on introverts as one of the 23 biggest ideas of the year.[7]
Call center studies, and other experiments
As a doctoral student, Grant and other students studied employees working at a university fundraising call center. They arranged a meeting between the callers and a former student who received a scholarship from the money they raised. Following the conversation with the former student, the callers increased effort and revenues by a large amount, sometimes 3 folds. Grant replicated the experiment five times, in order to rule out any possible confounding factors. The ability to present proven success by solid numbers, such as number and length of calls and dollars raised, gave Grant's research publicity among other researchers, as well as industry executives, who were impressed by the low cost of the method and its fast results.
In another experiment, Grant and David Hofmann put up two signs over hand washing stations in a hospital. The first one read: "Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases"; while the other read, "Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases." They assessed the effect of the signs simply by recording the amount of soap used, and sending observers to covertly record hand hygiene. The patient sign increased soap and gel usage by more than 45%, and handwashing behavior by more than 10%.
Prosocial motivation ideas
While Grant was an undergraduate student at Harvard, he worked as an advertising sales person for Let's Go travel guides. He said that he was a bad salesperson, until he met another student who was very successful in her job and was able to pay the tuition with her salary. As soon as he realized the benefit from successful sales to him and to other students, he started being more aggressive on his sales calls. Within few months, he broke the company's sales records and was promoted to director of advertising sales, where he won the Manager of the Year award.
"Givers", "matchers" and "takers"
In his book Give and Take, Grant highlights three different styles of interaction: taking, giving, and matching. In Grant's words: "Whereas takers strive to get as much as possible from others, and matchers aim to trade evenly, givers are the rare breed of people who contribute to others without expecting anything in return. These styles have a dramatic impact on success. Although some givers get exploited and burn out, the rest achieve extraordinary results across a wide range of industries." Grant explains why some givers sink to the bottom while others rise to the top, and argues that we underestimate the success of givers. Ultimately, he points out that givers are able to succeed in ways that lift others up — rather than cutting them down. In the long run, giving may be the most sustainable path to success and a work life rich with meaning.
Personal example
At Wharton, Grant has been honored with the Excellence in Teaching Award for every class that he has taught. Grant is known among students and colleagues as one who follows his ideas in his personal life. Unlike most academia personnel at his status, his email and social network details are available to all, and he regularly returns calls and requests for assistance, both in his field of expertise as well as advice about careers, Task management and Time management.
Grant has designed several experiential learning activities based on The Apprentice, in which students have raised over $175,000 for the Make-A-Wish Foundation, while developing leadership, influence, networking and collaboration skills.
Published works
Books
- 2013: Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, ISBN 978-0-670-02655-5 [8]
Papers
Grant has more than 70 publications in leading management and psychology journals. Among them are:
- Grant, Berg & Cable, 2013: Job titles as identity badges: How self-reflective titles can reduce emotional exhaustion, Academy of Management Journal
- Grant, 2013: Rocking the boat but keeping it steady: The role of emotion regulation in employee voice, Academy of Management Journal
- Grant, 2013: Rethinking the extraverted sales ideal: The ambivert advantage, Psychological Science 24: 1024–1030.
- Sonenshein, Dutton, Grant, Sutcliffe & Spreitzer, 2013: Growing at work: Employees’ interpretations of progressive self-change in organizations, Organization Science, 24: 552–570.
- Grant, 2012: Leading with meaning: Beneficiary contact, prosocial impact, and the performance effects of transformational leadership, Academy of Management Journal, 55: 458–476.
- Grant, 2012: Giving time, time after time: Work design and sustained employee participation in corporate volunteering, Academy of Management Review, 37: 589–615.
- Grant & Patil, 2012: Challenging the norm of self-interest: Minority influence and transitions to helping norms in work groups, Academy of Management Review, 37: 547–568.
- Grant & Dutton, 2012: Beneficiary or benefactor: The effects of reflecting about receiving versus giving on prosocial behavior, Psychological Science, 23: 1033–1039.
- List of Publications
Awards
Among the many awards Grant has received, are:
- The American Psychological Association (APA) Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Applied Psychology (2011)
- Cummings Scholarly Achievement Award, Academy of Management OB Division (2011)
- The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Distinguished Early Career Contributions Award – Science (2011)
- Owens Scholarly Achievement Award, Best Publication in I/O Psychology, SIOP (2010)
- National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (2004–2006)
- APA Early Research Award, Applied Science (2005)
- World's 40 Best Business School Professors Under 40, Poets and Quants / Fortune (2011)
Hobbies
Grant was an All-American springboard diver.[9] During his college time and afterwards, he used to work as a professional magician.[10]
References
- ^ Dominus, Susan. "Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead?". The New York Times. Retrieved April 2, 2013.
- ^ "Wharton Page".
- ^ "Give and Take Official Website".
- ^ Pink, Daniel. "Is purpose really an effective motivator?". Retrieved April 2, 2013.
- ^ Carter, Andrea. "The world's top business professors under 40". Fortune. Retrieved March 1, 2013.
- ^ Black, Victoria. "Favorite Professors: Wharton's Adam Grant". BusinessWeek. Retrieved March 1, 2013.
- ^ Cain, Susan. "Hire Introverts". The Atlantic. Retrieved March 1, 2013.
- ^ Bestseller by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Publisher’s Weekly, USA Today, San Francisco Chronicle, Indie Bound; reached #3 on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble (2013).
- ^ Grant was rated 47th in the US among public school male students in 1999. [1]
- ^ Adam Grant presenting his new book "Give and Take", while showing great story-telling as well as magician skills on YouTube