Don’t (always) talk to your neighbor
Conventional wisdom among managers holds that employees helping each other can only be good for a company. Accordingly, firms spend money, time and effort to promote what’s known as “knowledge transfer.” Policies range from the popular (lavish company retreats) to the maligned (switching desks every six months so that everyone has a chance to sit near everyone else). Recently, firms have even begun creating their own in-house social networks.But according to new research from the MIT Sloan School of Management, sharing is not necessarily good for the bottom line. Sometimes, encouraging employees to engage in “asocial learning” — using resources such as on-site libraries, training materials or archives of past work — is just as good, if not better, for a company’s overall performance. Sheen Levine, a visiting scholar at Sloan and an adjunct research scholar at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University, and...