Jane Dutton

Robert L. Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Business Administration and 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.

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.

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 and Jeff Bednar , 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 have been interested in the link between high quality interactions at work and human physiology and how this impacts organizational scholarship(published in Academy of Management Review). Amy Wrzesniewski, Gelaye Debebe and I 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 edited a book called Exploring Positive Relationships at Work: Building a Theoretical and Research Foundation", J. Dutton and B. Ragins (Eds.), (Lawrence Erlbaum, Inc., 2007) that tries to build a domain of cross level research that focuses on positive relationships at work. In this book Wayne Baker and I have been trying to develop the idea of Positive Social Capital and its implications for organizations. I also teach a 1.5 credit course on this topic for MBAs. You can find the syllabus along with full teaching notes under Teaching and Practice Materials/Course Syllabi on the Center for POS website.

3. Positive identities and work organizations.

Laura Morgan Roberts and I just finished co-editing a forthcoming book on Exploring Positive Identity and Organizations: Building a Theoretical and Research Foundation (Psychology Press, Forthcoming). We have worked with Jeff Bednar to create a framework for categorizing the different ways that organizational scholars have conceptualized positive identity and its implications for understanding how organizational practices cultivate an employee self that is beneficial or desirable in some way. This work on positive identity links to several other lines of research. Adam Grant and I are working on 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 have also examining institutionalized mechanisms of employee support that shape employee commitment through how they cultivate an employee’s prosocial identity (Academy of Management Journal, 2008). Finally, for several years I have worked with a team (Brianna Barker, Emily Heaphy, Laura Roberts, Bob Quinn, and Gretchen Spreitzer) to understand how and why reflected best-self appraisals (a form of positive identity) affect individuals and the relationships between individuals at work. We have developed and have been using a process, called the Reflected Best Self Exercise, whereby 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. The Reflected Best Self Exercise is available on the Center for POS website under Teaching and Practice Materials/Teaching Tools. 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. Our theory paper appeared in Academy of Management Review, and an applied paper was published in Harvard Business Review. We have completed a large-scale data collection effort with Harvard Business school MBAs; we are currently analyzing the data.

4. Job crafting at work

Amy Wrzesniewski, Justin Berg and I have been involved in a variety of projects related to how individuals alter their jobs “from below” to allow them to more fully use their strengths and passions. Amy and I have a paper on job crafting published in the Academy of Management Review Amy, Justin, and I have published an article in the Journal of Organizational Behavior that focuses on how employees at different levels of organizations craft their work differently. We see job crafting as an important means for unlocking resourcefulness from within a job. We have written several job crafting cases and developed the Job Crafting Exercise. We have also developed a theory-to-practice briefing on job crafting that pulls together all of the research on job crafting. All are available directly or by link from the Center for POS website under Teaching and Practice Materials/Suites.

5 . 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 published a conceptual in Organization Science in October, 2005. (You can listen to Gretchen's presentation at ICOS).

6. 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.