SMITH BRAIN TRUST — Want to talk about who is overpaid or underpaid at your office, or gripe about long hours or working conditions? Want to even take those complaints to social media?

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — Companies in which employees feel empowered to solve problems on their own, rather than simply follow rules, outperform peers where that doesn't happen — and employees at such companies feel a sense of

SMITH BRAIN TRUST — Can American companies be embarrassed out of paying their CEOs hundreds of times what the average worker makes? The SEC wants to find out.

SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- Do you have gender "faultlines" in your organization? New research from the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business suggests that such fissures appear when gender differences solidify into cliques.

Frontline workers making minimum wage sometimes get angry when they discover how much more their CEO earns. Yet if the goal is to motivate performance, new research from shows that rank-and-file employees care more about the pay divide between them and middle managers. The study by Smith professor Hui Liao, with co-authors Wei Chi, Lei Wang and Qing Ye from Tsinghua University in China and Rui Zhao from the University at Albany-State University of New York, sets emotion aside and explores compensation design as a strategic tool.

By HUI LIAO

By Hui Liao SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- High performers understand the adage: “It’s lonely at the top.” New research from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, which I co-authored with colleagues from four other institutions, confirms that outperforming workplace norms can prompt negative social consequences. But we also found the opposite.

College Park, Md. – March 15, 2012 – Hui Liao, associate professor of management and organization at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, was honored with the 2012 Cummings Scholarly Achievement Award. The prestigious award is one of the highest professional honors in the field of organizational behavior, given annually by the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management to recognize outstanding early- to mid-career scholarly achievement.

Flight Delays Cost Passengers Billions Mike Ball, Orkand Corporation Professor of Management Science, associate dean of research, and co-director of the National Center of Excellence for Aviation Operations Research (NEXTOR), published a study showing that in 2007 passengers traveling by plane were delayed by more than 28,000 years, costing them $16.7 billion in lost time. In total, flight delays in the United States cost $32.9 billion each year.