This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Technology has enabled people to reconnect easily with networks of contacts that have gone dormant. And it turns out that reconnecting dormant relationships can be extremely useful. In one experiment, advice that executives received from ties that had been dormant for at least three years was as useful, and often even more useful, than the advice they received from current relationships. The big payoffs of dormant ties are that: (1) They are great sources of unexpectedly novel insights, (2) reconnecting is extremely efficient, as it requires a minimal investment of time and (3) reconnecting is not like starting a relationship from scratch. People still have feelings of trust and a shared perspective, which are critical for receiving valuable knowledge from someone. The authors identify and answer "frequently asked questions"about reconnecting dormant ties. One concerns the staying power of relationships once reconnections have occurred. Typically, they conclude, these reconnected relationships do not become fully renewed and maintained, but those who reach out cite the experience as overwhelmingly positive.

Organizations cannot make significant gains unless some individuals within the organization take significant personal risks that catalyze effective collective action. The authors show that these individuals - whom they call 'Consistent Contributors' -- can change other group members' perceptions by modeling cooperative behavior, thereby increasing the chances for additional cooperation. These individuals, they explain, always contribute, regardless of others' choices. They describe their research findings, which indicate that characterizing consistent contributors as 'suckers' is both misleading and fallacious: indeed, their data leads them to believe that consistent contributors are actually 'saviors' rather than suckers. A serious challenge for managers, then, is the creation of contexts that encourage and support the emergence and recognition of Consistent Contributors.

In the heat of competition, executives can easily become obsessed with beating their rivals. This adrenaline-fueled emotional state, which the authors call competitive arousal, often leads to bad decisions. Managers can minimize the potential for competitive arousal and the harm it can inflict by avoiding certain types of interaction and targeting the causes of a win-at-all-costs approach to decision making. Through an examination of companies such as Boston Scientific and Paramount, and through research on auctions, the authors identified three principal drivers of competitive arousal: intense rivalry, especially in the form of one-on-one competitions; time pressure, found in auctions and other bidding situations, for example; and being in the spotlight - that is, working in the presence of an audience. Individually, these factors can seriously impair managerial decision making; together, their consequences can be dire, as evidenced by many high-profile business disasters. It's not possible to avoid destructive competitions and bidding wars completely. But managers can help prevent competitive arousal by anticipating potentially harmful competitive dynamics and then restructuring the deal-making process. They can also stop irrational competitive behavior from escalating by addressing the causes of competitive arousal. When rivalry is intense, for instance, managers can limit the roles of those who feel it most. They can reduce time pressure by extending or eliminating arbitrary deadlines. And they can deflect the spotlight by spreading the responsibility for critical competitive decisions among team members. Decision makers will be most successful when they focus on winning contests in which they have a real advantage - and take a step back from those in which winning exacts too high a cost.

It has become all-too-apparent of late that when faced with tough decisions, managers often act in accordance with their vested self-interest. What is less understood is that in many social situations, self-interest is channeled into a group or a society's interests, which can lead to a considerable change in our interpretations of ethics or morality. The authors explain how organizations can achieve a reduction in unethical behavior by establishing social support for moral action; espousing wide-ranging consideration of the moral consequences of individual and group decisions; and emphasizing the need for moral awareness, judgment, intent and action.

Despite engaging with other people on a regular basis, individuals vary significantly in their willingness to trust. For some, trusting intentions are central to their conceptions of their social selves; while for others, the social world takes second place to their individually-motivated concerns. Despite these differences, extrinsic motivations (i.e., the tangible benefits that result from trusting) provide strong motivations to establish mutual trust and/or mutually-trusting reciprocal actions. The authors present the Motivated Attributions Model, with explains the conditions under which acts of trust are most likely. One immediate implication of their Model is for individuals in potentially-trusting relationships to seriously consider the effects of their motivations, their dependencies, their need to see themselves positively, and their inability to fully understand their counterparts' perceptions.