Professor Ashford's research focuses on the ways that individuals are proactive in their organizational lives, whether it is in assessing their own performance by seeking feedback, enhancing their managerial effectiveness by staying "tuned in" to various constituents, facilitating their own socialization during organizational entry, or attempting to sell particular issues to top management from the middle ranks of organizations.

Work on Positive Organizational Scholarship

I have been working for two decades on the various ways that humans are agentic in their organizational lives. I have always found limiting the emphasis managers and leaders in out literature and the accompanying relegation of most individual action to the role of reacting to those upper-level initiatives.

Most folks I know are more proactive than this and are, in fact, actively trying to create their own success in life (and in their work lives). I've studied this proactivity in the area of feedback seeking (proposing that folks don't wait for the annual performance review to see how they're doing in an organization but rather are active in trying to assess this frequently), in the area of socialization (arguing that newcomers don't simply wait to be socialized, but are active in scoping and learning the new environment and trying to create what works best for them within it); in the area of managerial effectiveness (arguing that managers have ambiguous jobs in which they have to please multiple constituencies and those manager who are more proactive in managing these constituencies should be more successful); and in the area of issue selling (arguing that middle managers don't simply accept the strategic agenda form above, but actively try to influence it to gain attention for the issues that they think are important).

In all of these areas individuals can be proactive and attempt to influence their world balancing instrumental aims (to gain feedback, to win attention for an issue) with concerns for image (how will my proactivity look to others) and, often ego (how will it feel if I seek feedback and it is negative or if I successfully sell an issue and it turns out to be wrong). Positive Organizational Scholarship has offered me a new lens to think about different questions in the areas I have focused on traditionally and also suggests new areas of study.