Investigating Organizational Virtuousness, Abundance, and Performance

1. Organizational virtuousness and performance

This study examines the relationships between virtuousness in and by organizations and organization outcomes such as productivity, profitability, quality, innovation, customer satisfaction, and employee loyalty. The extent to which organizations foster virtuousness—including compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, humility, integrity—in their practices and cultures have been found to positively affect effective performance. This work has been conducted with David Bright and Arran Caza and published in American Behavioral Scientist, Journal of Business Ethics, and the Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies. It also appears in the book Positive Leadership (San Francisco: Berrett Koehler).

This study explains how an organization achieved a level of performance that most knowledgeable observers considered to be impossible. It is the study of the clean-up and closure of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Arsenal. Whereas the U.S. Department of Energy’s study budgeted $36 billion and estimated that the clean-up would take more than 70 years, the entire job was completed 60 years early, $30 billion under budget, and 13 times cleaner than required. This study explains the leadership principles that made this level of extraordinary performance possible. The results are produced in a book, Making the Impossible Possible: Leading Positive Change – The Rocky Flats Story (San Francisco: Berrett Koehler).

The focus of this study is trying to understand the positive dynamics that lead to organizational healing after a crisis and the development of resiliency amidst outside pressures. One study investigated how a university healed after experiencing a shooting and hostage crisis by an intruder into a university building. Another study investigated the U.S. airline industry after the September 11th, 2001 tragedies. This work appears in the Journal of Applied Behavior Science, the Journal of Management, Spirituality, and Religion, and in the book, the Virtuous Organization (London: World Scientifi).

An on-going project—appearing in the book Developing Management Skills (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall)—with David Whetten investigates the relationship between certain key management skills and the success of individual leaders. A learning model has been developed to help change leadership and managerial behavior in the classroom, and issues such as evaluation, effective pedagogy, and leadership principles constitute an on-going interest.

Research based on the Competing Values Framework—contained in Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture (San Francisco: Jossey Bass) and Competing Values Leadership (London: Edward Elgar) with Robert Quinn, Jeff DeGraff, and Anjan Thakor—is a long-term and on-going area of interest. An investigation predicting the success or failure of mergers and acquisitions, for example, has been conducted as well as the relationships between certain management skill profiles, organizational culture profiles, and performance.