
William Russell
Kelly Professor of
Business
Administration;
Professor of
Management and
Organizations;
Professor of
Psychology
University of
Michigan
janedut@umich.edu

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.
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