Focus of POS Scholarship

It is exciting for me to realize, albeit somewhat belatedly, that my research passions and organizational beliefs have, for some time now, almost all reflected aspects of positive organizational behavior and scholarship. Several of my research streams are relevant to POS. The first looks at leadership that enhances employee creative engagement and performance. The second more directly concerns the effects of positive self-concept factors (efficacy, role identity) on creativity and helping behaviors in for profit organizations, in non-profit health care and advocacy organizations that rely on a sense of cause in their employees, and in nonprofits that rely directly on unpaid or volunteer labor. What links these areas together, for me, is the power of choice—what we often call discretionary behavior—in a more positive, high-performing workplace.

1. Leading employees to creativity

While all organizations say they want creativity, and virtually all individuals enjoy feeling creative, a great deal of recent work has indicated that generating a creativity-supportive environment can be challenging, partly because myths about who can and cannot be creative abound. My work here has focused on areas where both organizations and employees can make a difference in shattering some of these myths. First, it’s often assumed that creativity is purely innate, with only some individuals capable of it. While my research supports the idea that internal attributes like innovative cognitive style are important, it also shows that leaders that exhibit positive exchange relationships with subordinates, and who are themselves intrinsically motivated to be creative, have a major impact in enhancing subordinate creativity (Tierney, Farmer, & Graen,1999). In that study, such leadership helped elevate the creative performance of “adaptive” individuals beyond that level of their “innovative” colleagues. Leaders can have a positive Pygmalion effect on employee creativity: leaders that expect creativity generate that positive self-fulfilling prophecy by acting supportively on their beliefs, ultimately enhancing employee efficacy and creative performance (Tierney & Farmer, 2004). Currently, with Pam Tierney, I am looking at the array of behaviors leaders can use to support creativity, and how those leader behaviors can set off a positive chain reaction of group-level support for individual creativity (e.g., Tierney & Farmer, 2006).

2. Positive employee self-concepts, creativity, and helping: What we learn from paid and unpaid workers in for-profit and nonprofit workplaces

A second, more employee-centered side of my research is largely reflected by this quote: “…a sense of identity is the root by which all honest creative effort is fed.” (J. Saunders Redding, from his address at the First Conference of Negro Writers, March 1959). This passage highlights that self-identification—how we see ourselves and who we think we are—has a great deal to do with our choice to creatively and positively engage. Pam Tierney and I developed the construct of creative efficacy (Tierney & Farmer, 2002), which reflects the confidence individuals have in their own creative abilities. We found a number of personal and organizational factors led to creative self-efficacy, which in turn led to higher levels of creative performance. We found this to be true not only in a professional work environment where job characteristics are relatively supportive of creativity, but even in blue-collar work where creative performance is sometimes de-valued, which speaks to the myth that only some workplaces can be creative. From our perspective, latent creativity exists in all individuals and in all workplaces, and its valuing and nourishment is therefore a choice of both employee and organization. We further explored the role of positive self-concept in being creative in a study that examined how a creative role identity enhanced creativity in Taiwanese employees (Farmer, Tierney, & Kung-McIntyre, 2003), and how that identity is shaped by self-views, perceived other-views, and acculturative experiences.

A related area of my POS has looked not at employees, but at volunteers or unpaid workers. While many socially important organizations rely on volunteer labor (e.g., the March of Dimes), this worker group has been virtually ignored by organizational theorists. My work has focused on what drives high levels of participation, engagement, and effective performance on the part of volunteers (Farmer & Fedor, 1999, 2001), finding that organizational support, role investments, positive coworker interaction, and congruent functional motives all have positive effects. Recently, Linn Van Dyne and I co-authored a conceptual article (Van Dyne & Farmer, 2005) linking a role identity as a volunteer and expressive functional motives within a psychological contract perspective to high levels of client helping.

To extend these ideas, I am currently collecting several waves of data in a nonprofit organization where the core mission is helping vulnerable children (up to age 14) and their families, and workplace ideology emphasizes client helping values. The organization provides residential treatment for very emotionally disturbed or disruptive youth, emergency shelter for runaway children or children in immediately danger of harm from others, and similar programs. The nonprofit status and particular social mission of this organization inherently results in low pay and more difficult working conditions relative to other opportunities, meaning that the organization relies heavily on a sense of cause in its employees. Employees regularly described their jobs with identity and value-laden phrases (e.g., it must be in your heart; people who stay here have a heart for this work and believe in the mission statement), suggesting that client helping identity is salient for many. In addition, employees often described specific examples of client helping not explicitly specified by their jobs such as sitting up all night with a troubled child, shrugging off an injury inflicted by an emotionally-disturbed child, or even memorializing a child that died as a result of parental abuse. In this kind of setting we see organizationally important and socially critical goals that can only be carried out by employees acting as if they are volunteers—engaging for their clients because it is “who they are.” Data collection is not yet complete, but an initial study looking at the effects of client helping identity, identity verification, and fit of the self with the role was presented recently at the Academy of Management (Farmer & Van Dyne, 2005). One speculation from this study and other work I have done is that the distinctions we make between different types of workers like “employee” and “volunteer” are quite arbitrary and often serve only to keep us from learning how an individual, whatever his or her work role, can work with intrinsic motivation and positive impact.

Please visit my web site, which has links to research articles.

References

Tierney, P., & Farmer. S.M. 2006. A multi-level perspective on leading for creativity. Paper to be presented at the annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, Atlanta.

Farmer, S.M., & Van Dyne, L. 2005. Doing only what they like to do? Role identities, role fit, and role verification as predictors of role behaviors. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management, Hawaii.

Van Dyne, L., & Farmer, S. M. 2005. It’s who I am: Role identity and organizational citizenship behavior of volunteers. In D. L. Turnipseed (Ed.), A handbook on organizational citizenship behavior: A review of ‘Good Soldier’ activity in organizations: 177-203. Hauppage, NY: Nova Science Publishing.

Tierney, P., & Farmer, S. M. 2004. An application of the Pygmalion process to subordinate creativity. Journal of Management, 30: 413-432.

Farmer, S. M., Tierney, P., & Kung-McIntyre, K. 2003. Employee creativity in Taiwan: An application of role identity theory. Academy of Management Journal, 46: 618-630.

Tierney, P., & Farmer, S. M. 2002. Creative self-efficacy: Its potential antecedents and relationship to creative performance. Academy of Management Journal, 45: 1137-1148.

Farmer, S. M., & Fedor, D. B. 2001. Changing the focus on volunteering: An investigation of volunteers’ multiple contributions to a charitable organization. Journal of Management, 27: 191-211.

Tierney, P., Farmer, S. M., & Graen, G. B. 1999. An examination of leadership and employee creativity: The relevance of traits and relations. Personnel Psychology, 52: 591-620.

Farmer, S. M., & Fedor, D. B. 1999. Volunteer participation and withdrawal: A psychological contract perspective on the role of satisfaction, expectations, and organizational support. Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 9: 349-367.