Melbourne Business School

In this inaugural episode of In Business with AI, Melbourne Business School Dean Professor Jenny George sits down with Professor Jon Whittle from the Institute of Digital Innovation and AI to provide leaders with a practical roadmap for navigating AI. From his role as technical lead at NASA to leading CSIRO’S Data 61 and creating Australia’s National AI Centre, Jon has been at the forefront of AI for 30 years. In this episode, Jon shares why every leader has to be an AI leader, how to help your teams adapt to one of the most disruptive technologies of our time, the impact of AI on blue collar work no one is talking about, and why the rubber has hit the road for the costs of tokens. Links: https://mbs.edu/centres/institute-for-digital-innovation-and-ai https://www.publishing.csiro.au/book/8244/ https://www.dewr.gov.au/workplace-relations/resources/ai-and-employment-australia https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publication/enterprise-ai-playbook/ https://www.finance.gov.au/government/public-data/data-and-digital-ministers-meeting/national-framework-assurance-artificial-intelligence-government https://deepmind.google/science/alphafold/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4392592/ https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/0674576187?ref_=mr_referred_us_au_au https://andromedarobotics.ai/team https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/better-offline/id1730587238 https://www.diamandis.com/podcast 6ea7e2c0-8aeb-11f1-8707-afb689bd8abd

Working remotely during COVID-19 has led to record levels of stress and burnout, but embracing the principles of mindfulness could help. In the latest episode of the Melbourne Business School Podcast, Professorial Fellow Amanda Sinclair explains why stress levels increase when people are working from home, and offers practical advice for professionals and managers on how to embrace the principles of mindfulness.

People usually assume that silence during a negotiation is an intimidation tactic, but new research shows it can actually lead to more collaborative outcomes. Melbourne Business School Associate Professor of Management Jennifer Overbeck and MIT Sloan Gordon Kaufman Professor of Management Jared Curhan spoke with Yasmin Rupesinghe about their findings on the latest episode of the Melbourne Business School Podcast. "When you ask people, 'what's your intuition about what happens when someone goes silent in a negotiation', they report that they think the other person is trying to get into my head, they're trying to wear me down, to play mind games with me," says Associate Professor Overbeck. "So, almost certainly what would happen if somebody went silent in a negotiation is that the other person would get freaked out and give away a lot of the value in that negotiation. "Instead, we've done at this point quite a few studies, and repeatedly what we have found is that silence seems to provide the negotiator an opportunity to pause and to sort of tamp down the heat of competition in the negotiation, and just take a little bit of mental space that allows the opportunity for collaboration to move to the fore."

Hostility toward employees from a manager is called "abusive supervision", and it can include actively lying to subordinates, ridiculing them, not giving them the credit they deserve and being overly controlling. In her latest research, Deshani Ganegoda, an Associate Professor of Management at Melbourne Business School, looked at the psychological effects abuse has on victimised employees and the role of the senior manager in these situations. She spoke with Yasmin Rupisinghe about her findings in the latest episode of the Melbourne Business School Podcast. "Subordinates can sometimes justify and normalise bad behaviour of their managers," she said. "For example, when your whole team gets treated badly, you might think that's just how things are done around here. You don't consider it as an anomaly. In fact, subordinates might even justify abusive supervision as tough love or think that's just 'how my manager motivates people'. "In contrast, senior managers are above the abusive supervisor. They have the vantage point to see the behaviour of many middle level managers. So, they see the difference between abusive supervisors and non-abusive supervisors." Associate Professor Ganegoda said that senior managers were not just best-placed to spot abusive supervision, but also to intervene. "If someone were to stop abusive supervision from happening, it's going to be the supervisor's manager."

For a culturally-diverse team to perform exceptionally, leadership needs to be shared among its members, says Associate Professor Carol Gill. "We're all different in terms of the way we see the world, and culture is one of the lenses in which we see the world differently," she says. Professors Carol Gill from Melbourne Business School, Nicole Gillespie from University of Queensland and Bart De Jong from the Australian Catholic University spoke with Yasmin Rupesinghe on the latest episode of the Melbourne Business School Podcast about a new way to foster trust to improve performance in culturally diverse teams. "There are two different types of leadership. One is where there's a nominated leader, who can tell people what to do, and the second type of leadership is collective leadership," she says. "This is where the individuals step up to leadership or make a leadership intervention in a team and of course it may be multiple interventions that will be made in any single interaction in a team. "One team member might show the team what direction to go in. Another team member might make an intervention about how the team should proceed. A third team member might talk about social aspects of the team, encouraging others or supporting others. "We know that there are many different interventions, and the thing is that these interventions will build trust because the conflicts that may occur when things are more chaotic will be addressed by these leadership interventions. "So, leadership can play a very big role in increasing trust, either by dyadic interactions where they talk one-on-one with others or where they speak to the team as a whole." Listen to the full episode above or visit our podcasts page for more. Carol Gill is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Melbourne Business School, who has specialised in the fields of executive development, human resource management and organisational development for more than 25 years. Nicole Gillespie is the KPMG Chair in Organisational Trust and Professor of Management at the University of Queensland Business School, and an International Research Fellow at the Centre for Corporate Reputation, Oxford University. Bart De Jong is an Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the Australian Catholic University, whose research focuses on trust in teams and has been published in scholarly journals such as Academy of Management Journal (AMJ), Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP), and Organization Science. Yasmin is a Program Manager on our Executive MBA and Senior Executive MBA programs, and a radio presenter for PBS FM. To find out more about studying at Melbourne Business School, visit mbs.edu