Connecting to Positive Organizational Scholarship

1. Psychological empowerment at work

For almost 15 years, I am been studying the psychological experience of empowerment at work to better understand human agency at work. I have developed and validated a measure of psychological empowerment that has been used around the world with people in all kinds of organizations and at different levels of the organizational hierarchy. Much of my work has focused on organizations can build cultures, systems and processes to nurture more empowerment as well as establishing the benefits of empowerment for individuals and organizations. An overview of this research is captured in a book I wrote with Robert Quinn entitled A Company of Leaders: Five Disciplines for Unleashing the Power in Your Workforce (Jossey-Bass, 2001). More recent work has examined empowerment in amidst organizational change and for purposes of leadership development.

As part of a thriving research lab (Marlys Christianson, Jane Dutton, Adam Grant, Kathie Sutcliffe, and Scott Sonenshein), we have been studying conditions that enable thriving at work. We published a conceptual paper in Organization Science in October, 2005. (Listen to our lab present it at POS Links, or at ICOS.) We have two empirical projects to further understand the dynamics of thriving at work. The first with Marlys Christianson and Kathie Sutcliffe empirically examines our socially embedded model of thriving at work and demonstrates how thriving contributes to positive health. The second analyzes individual narratives of thriving at work based on data we have collected in three diverse organizations. Future research is aimed at understanding unit level thriving.

I am working with a team (Brianna Barker, Kathryn Dekas, Jane Dutton, Emily Heaphy, Laura Roberts, Brent Rosso, and Bob Quinn) to understand how and why reflected best-self appraisals affect individuals and the relationships between individuals at work. We have developed and have been using a process where by individuals receive feedback about how and when they have added value from people who are from different spheres of people’s lives—work colleagues, friends, family members. (Click here to access the assessment tool. An online conference is also available for viewing). The experience of getting this form of feedback is transformative. We are trying to understand the social and psychological pathways by which this practice affects people. We have a theory paper that appeared in Academy of Management Review, an applied paper Harvard Business Review and have completed a large-scale data collection effort with Harvard Business School MBAs. We are currently analyzing the data and designing a field study to demonstrate the power of the RBS exercise.

This is part of a larger research effort at the Ross School on how business organizations can contribute to work peace led by Tim Fort and Cindy Schipani. In this research, I seek to understand how businesses can promote peace through two organizational features: participative organizational leadership and employee empowerment. These can create conditions in companies and communities that, in turn, may foster peace in civic and governmental domains. Using various data sets that include nearly 80 countries, I found less corruption and less unrest in countries where the leadership of business organizations is more participative and where employees report more freedom to make decisions. This research seeks to show one ways that business organizations can create models of peaceful societies that ultimately can move societies toward more peaceful outcomes. Click here for a copy of the study.