My research examines the many ways in which human foibles and frailties complicate the behavior and analysis of the organizational systems that we create.

Specifically, my work focuses on three primary areas which are described below.

1. Judgment, Decision Making and Negotiation

(a) The Role of Advice Seeking and Advice Taking in Decision Making

Most of the choices we make on a daily basis are the result of weighing our own opinions with advice from other sources. Do we use advice wisely? Evidence suggests we could do better. My work investigates factors that influence advice seeking and taking, including features of the advice (e.g., its cost), features of the task at hand (e.g., task difficulty), features of the advisor (e.g., expertise, gender, similarity to advice recipient) and features of the advice receiver (e.g., incidental emotions experienced by the person making the final decision). In addition, my research investigates the psychological mechanism behind advice underweighting and advice overweighting.

Representative papers:

• Gino, Francesca. (2006). Let me give you some advice. Forethought. Harvard Business Review, March Issue.
• Gino, Francesca, and Don A. Moore (2007). Effects of task difficulty on use of advice. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. 20(1): 21-35.
• Gino, Francesca. (forthcoming). Do we listen to advice just because we paid for it? The impact of advice cost on its use. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
• Gino, Francesca, Jen Shang and Rachel C. Croson (forthcoming). The Impact of Information from Similar or Different Advisors on Judgment. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
• Gino, Francesca, Jen Shang and Rachel C. Croson (2007). Telling or Showing? Effects of Advice from Others on Judgment. (under review)
• Gino, Francesca and Maurice Schweitzer (forthcoming). Take this advice and shove it. Journal of Applied Psychology.

(b) Unethical Behavior and Unethical Decision Making

This research stream investigates factors that can explain individual unethical behavior and corruption in organizations. Part of this work builds on the assumption that the majority of unethical events result from ordinary and predictable psychological processes (Banaji et al., 2003; Bazerman & Banaji, 2004). Thus, even good people regularly engage in unethical behavior, without their own awareness.

Representative papers:

• Gino, Francesca and Max H. Bazerman. (2007). Slippery slopes and misconduct: When and why we get accustomed to others’ unethical behavior. (under review)
• Gino, Francesca, and Lamar Pierce. (2007). The Robin Hood Under the Hood: Discriminatory Fraud in Automotive Service (under review)
• Gino, Francesca, and Lamar Pierce. (2007). The Robin Hood Effect: Unethical Behavior in the Presence of Wealth (under review)
• Gino, Francesca, Don A. Moore, and Max H. Bazerman. (forthcoming). See No Evil: Why We Fail to Notice Unethical Behavior.
• Gino, Francesca, Don A. Moore, and Max H. Bazerman. (2008). No harm, no foul: The outcome bias in ethical judgments. (under review)

(c) Negotiation

This research stream explores some of the counter-intuitive outcomes of negotiation strategies that are commonly believed to be helpful. For instance, conventional wisdom holds that negotiators who are under time pressure should avoid revealing their final deadlines to the other side, especially if they are in a weak position. In one of our project, my colleague Don Moore and I question this conventional wisdom.

Representative papers:

• Gino, Francesca, and Don A. Moore. (2008). Why negotiators should reveal their deadlines: Disclosing Weaknesses Can Make You Stronger. Negotiation & Conflict Management Research. Negotiation & Conflict Management Research, 1(1), 77-96.
• Gino, Francesca and Don A. Moore. (forthcoming). Using Final Deadlines in Negotiation. Negotiation & Conflict Management Research.

(d) Biases in Decision Making

A few of my current projects investigate factors exacerbating or reducing well-known biases in the decision making literature and explore the managerial implications of these systematic errors.

Representative papers:

• Don A. Moore, Samuel A. Swift, Zachariah Sharek and Francesca Gino (2007). Correspondence Bias in Performance Evaluation: Why Grade Inflation Works. (under review)

2. Innovation and Organizational Learning

While most researchers and practitioners interested in innovation and learning agree that an organization’s ability to learn is a critical source of competitive advantage, less agreement has been reached on what factors influence or inhibit learning within groups and organizations. Understanding what elements affect learning is important in explaining why some organizations or groups learn better or faster than others. In this stream of research, my colleagues and I investigate how individuals and groups learn and how their learning affects their behavior and performance within organizational settings.

Representative papers:

• Edmondson, Amy, David Garvin and Francesca Gino (2008). Is Your Organization a Learning Organization? Harvard Business Review, March, 109-116.
• Gino, Francesca, Amy Edmondson and David Garvin and (2007). Measuring learning in learning organizations (in preparation)
• Miron-Spektor, Ella, Linda Argote and Francesca Gino (2008). The effects of paradoxical cognition on innovation and learning. (under review)

3. Behavioral Operations

Human beings are critical to the functioning of the vast majority of operating systems, influencing both the way these systems work and how they perform. Yet most formal analytical models of operations assume that the people who participate in operating systems are fully rational or at least can be induced to behave rationally. In contrast to this view, my colleagues and I argue that operations management scholars should incorporate behavioral factors into OM research. We define behavioral operations as an emergent approach to the study of operations that explicitly incorporates social and cognitive psychology theory. In particular, we define behavioral operations as the study of attributes of human behavior and cognition that impact the design, management, and improvement of operating systems, and the study of the interaction between such attributes and operating systems and processes.

Representative papers:

• Gino, Francesca, and Gary Pisano. (in press). Toward a Theory of Behavioral Operations, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
• Bloomfield, Robert J., Francesca Gino and Susan L. Kulp (2007). Behavioral Causes of the Bullwhip Effect in a Single Echelon. (under review)