Mission

The Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship is a community of scholars devoted to energizing and transforming organizations through research on the theory and practice of positive organizing and leadership. We are passionately dedicated to the development and dissemination of POS research.

Key Activities

• Create and test new theories of positive organizational behavior and research instruments to measure positive organizational phenomena
• Develop and market POS educational cases and tools
• Disseminate POS ideas and intellectual products to scholars, students, corporations, nonprofits, and communities.
• Develop co-learning partnerships with select companies and nonprofit organizations.

History

Energy – positive emotion – resilience – virtues – leadership – thriving – abundance. In the past, individual organizational scholars throughout the world have examined these topics and more, but there was no umbrella under which these endeavors were organized, and no dedicated effort to examine the possibilities of linking the ideas and research outcomes of these various areas. What extraordinary outcomes are enabled by applying such a lens?

In 2001, Kim Cameron, Jane Dutton, and Bob Quinn envisioned a new field of study to encompass these related research topics, coined the term positive organizational scholarship (POS). In 2002, they founded the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship, dedicated to growing this important new movement in organizational research.