Statement of Research Interests in Positive Organizational Scholarship

Positive organizational behavior underlies a number of my studies on topics that differ at first glance but have the common theme of constructive, above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty behavior by individuals in organizations. This interest goes back to an early publication with Dennis Organ on organizational citizenship behavior (OCBs; AMJ 1983). More recently, Lynn Andersson published with me an article from her dissertation about champions for the natural environment in business organizations (AMJ, 2000). And, prompted by what had become a standard buzzword in management practice, Mike Crant and I began working on proactive behavior (1993, JOM), behavior that creates change. Proactive behavior has since been shown to predict a variety of outcomes including perceptions of charismatic and transformational leadership, reduced stress, sales performance, and positive career outcomes.

Several relevant in-progress projects focus on intrinsic motivation, a source of a variety of positive outcomes and one that probably is “ideal” compared to motivation that is driven by external contingencies:

1) Bruce Barry and I are writing about people who pursue long-term goals that are unlike the usual short-term goals of most people. The people we interviewed persist even in the face of little or no progress, and with an expectation that success might be decades away. The goals are positive in nature and are big, daunting, visionary, stretch goals. We view this as a different context for studying intrinsic motivation, we think the people are somehow special with respect to both their goals and in the ways in which they pursue them, and we are looking forward to learning about positive motivation from the results of our interviews.

2) Chris Porath and I wrote a chapter for Positive Organizational Scholarship. It is titled “Transcendent Behavior,” referring to behavior that is self-determined more than environmentally-driven, and that effects positive change in the environment (which could include positive impact on other people) or creates higher-potential outcomes for the individual (well-being and performance). We drew from Bandura’s social learning theory and Stewart’s model of the managerial role (demands, constraints, and opportunities). In the workplace, standard utilitarian behavior involves attempts to meet demands, perform within the constraints, and ignore or respond passively to opportunities. In contrast, transcendent behavior results in demands that are exceeded, constraints that are managed and changed in constructive ways, and opportunities that are seized or created. We identified some constructs in the literature that are examples or predictive of transcendent behavior, discuss its potential downsides and why there is not more of it, and offered some prescriptions for practice and questions for future research.

3) Rob Cross and I are studying psychological well-being in the workplace as predicted by the extrinsic and intrinsic goals people are pursuing and the nature of the social interactions they have at work. We also are using individual differences (for example, learning and performance goal orientations) as predictor variables. We have questionnaire data, with predictor variables separated from dependent (well-being) measures by several weeks, from about 1000 respondents. We have just begun data analysis.