Connecting to Positive Organizational Scholarship

I have several different research clusters that connect to core premises of POS, some of which focus on organizations as contexts that create positive capabilities of whole systems. Others focus more on the dynamics of positive interactions/relationships in organizations and their implications for individuals and organizations as a whole. I briefly describe the clusters below.

1. Compassion and organizations.

As part of the Compassion Lab (Jason Kanov, Jacoba Lilius, Monica Worline, Sally Maitlis and the late Peter Frost ) we have been trying to explore three core questions: 1) Why are some organizations more effective than others in creating and sustaining compassionate responding to trauma and pain in employees’ lives? 2) What are the effects of compassion at work on employees? 3) What does compassionate leadership look like and what difference does it make? You can see a sampling of our work at our website. There are also new papers available off of the POS website in the working papers series.

2. The power of positive (high quality) connections.

Several years ago I wrote a book called "Energize your workplace: How to build and sustain high quality connections at work" (Jossey-Bass , 2003) in which I tried to unpack the micro-processes that contribute the building of high quality connections between people, and try to articulate why this is important for individuals and for firms. At the core of the book is a working premise that high quality connections are energy-creating ones whereas low quality connections are energy-depleting. With Ryan Quinn, we have developed a model of interpersonal coordination in organizations that has as its centerpiece the idea of energy created or destroyed in conversation (published in the Academy of Management Review). With Michele Williams, we are testing how positive and negative emotions associated with interactions with different people at work affect a range of individual outcomes. Emily Heaphy and I are working on the effects of high quality connections on human physiology. Amy Wrzesniewski, myself and Gelaye Debebe have a paper in Research in Organizational Behavior that looks at how positive interactions (and negative interactions) shape work, job and self-identity, and the meaning of work more generally. All of these efforts are attempt so understand the generative dynamics of positive connections at work. Belle Ragins and I have an edited forthcoming book called "Exploring Positive Relationships at Work: Building a Theoretical and Research Foundation", J. Dutton and B. Ragins (Eds.), (Lawrence Erlbaum, Inc., 2006) that tries to build a domain of focus on positive relationships at work that crosses levels of analyses. In this book Wayne Baker and I have been trying to develop the idea of Positive Social Capital (the chapter is downloadable from the working papers page).

3. Enabling thriving at work.

As part of a thriving research lab (Gretchen Spreitzer, Kathie Sutcliffe, Scott Sonenshein and Adam Grant) we have been studying conditions that enable thriving at work. We have finished a conceptual paper that we published in Organization Science in October, 2005. (You can listen to Gretchen's presentation at ICOS). We are also analyzing narratives of thriving at work based on data we have collected in three organizations.

4. Caring and work organizations.

Amy Wrzesniewski and I have been working on trying to understand how caring behaviors at work create contexts where others can thrive. We studied people who clean hospitals (with Gelaye Debebe) and we use cleaners’ accounts of the work they do for patients, doctors, patients’ families and nurses to compose an account of caring competence as an individual and a systemic accomplishment. Our work attempts to describe and explain the effort and competence involved in everyday caring at work.

5. The reflected best self and the path to becoming extraordinary in organizations.

I am working with a team (Brianna Barker, Kathryn Dekas Emily Heaphy, Laura Roberts, Brent Rosso, Bob Quinn, and Gretchen Spreitzer) 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 off of the POS website. 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 in the Harvard Business Review and have completed a large-scale data collection effort with Harvard Business School MBAs. We are currently analyzing the data.

6. Being a contribution and generosity in organizations.

I am working with Adam Grant on a project on positive self-narration that focuses explicitly on the difference it makes to think of oneself as a contribution. We are doing a series of field experiments designed to understand the impact and mechanisms that explain this form of positive self-narration. We are also examining institutionalized mechanisms of organizational generosity through a study with the Borders Foundation to better understand how an institutionalized employee assistance program affects people’s attachment to and behavior toward their work organization.

7. Issue selling and organizational change
Sue Ashford, myself and several graduate students have been working for several years on the conditions that enable voice and issue selling in organizations. We see this work as related to POS through themes of proactivity, organizational support, courage, and capability- building. We see important differences across organizations in their capacity to shape the micro processes that encourage effective issue selling. We see issue selling, in turn, as central to a firm’s adaptive capability.

Please visit my website to get more information on my research.