Focusing on Positivity in Organizational Behavior

Positive organizational scholarship is a growing field within organizational behavior focused on promoting positivity in organizations. It arose as a way to address the need for balancing moral and rational goals. Instead of being completely new, it provides a fresh perspective, like looking at the world from a different angle. In today's society, there are numerous significant challenges such as global warming, natural disasters, economic crises, increasing homelessness rates, terrorism, and ongoing conflicts.

Amidst the prevailing negativity and uncertainty, it is important to focus on the positive.

In a world filled with sadness and horror, where does positive psychology fit in today's priorities? Positive psychology, a scientific field focusing on happiness, optimism, personal growth, and well-being, highlights elements that lead to thriving communities and societies.

Positive psychology, in a world filled with negativity, highlights positive experiences at three time points: a) reflecting on the past for contentment; b) concentrating on current happiness in the present; and c) incorporating optimism and hope for the future.

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Aristotle and Plato believed that living virtuously would result in genuine happiness. Seligman differentiates between two forms of happiness within positive psychology: hedonic happiness, marked by elevated positive emotions and decreased negative emotions; and high subjective life satisfaction.

Eudemonic wellbeing, as defined by Hefferon & Boniwell (2011), emphasizes the importance of finding meaning and purpose in life. Positive psychology aims to enhance quality of life and prevent problems that arise when life lacks meaning. Seligman's model of positive psychology includes the pleasurable life, good life, and meaningful life. The "pleasurable life" involves activities such as shopping, eating, and engaging in meaningless behaviors.

Research indicates that having many pleasures does not necessarily result in increased life satisfaction. Seligman believes that true fulfillment comes from recognizing and utilizing one's core strengths in work, love, and play. He and Chris Peterson developed the VIA Signature Strengths Survey to show that a deeply engaged life is connected to higher levels of satisfaction. Ultimately, living a "meaningful life" involves using one's strengths for a purpose greater than oneself.

Living a life of faith and purpose is connected to life satisfaction. Marty believes this is linked to Positive Institutions, which are organizations that encourage positive character development and meaning. While Marty mainly focuses on non-profits and religious groups, others are using this approach in for-profit businesses as well (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). Both scholars and professionals have highlighted the importance of a positive approach to selecting, developing, and managing human resources in organizations.

Extensive research and consulting by the Gallup Organization support the importance of positive, strength-based organizational cultures and human resource practices in placement, compensation, and motivation. These practices contribute to organizational performance and competitiveness by focusing on underlying strategies, structures, and cultures.

For instance, effective selection and placement practices that utilize employees' talents, clear goals and expectations, social support and recognition, and opportunities for growth and self-actualization have been shown to have a significant impact on employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and organizational profitability and growth (Harter, Schmidt, & Keynes, 2003). Academically, the Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) movement has played a key role in providing macro-level scholars with a conceptual framework for organizing and integrating their research on positive organizations (Cameron et al., 2003).

Positive organizational scholarship (POS) is an alternative approach to studying organizations which focuses on elevating processes and outcomes, interpersonal and structural dynamics, and the rigorous investigation of positive phenomena in organizational settings within a specific context. According to KIM S. CAMERON & CAZA (2004), POS plays a critical theoretical role in contemporary organizational scholarship.

By utilizing essays on critical theory in organizational science to examine POS research and incorporating principles from Gestalt psychology, it is suggested that the key differences between POS and traditional organizational scholarship center on POS's focus on positive processes, value transparency, and expanding the definition of positive organizational outcomes. This leads to the conclusion that the main impact of POS is providing an alternative to the deficit model prevalent in organizational research (Caza & Caza, 2008). Multiple factors contribute to the lack of attention given to positive phenomena in organizational science.

Reasons for the neglect of positive organizational scholarship (POS) include a lack of valid and reliable measuring devices, the association of positivity with uncritical science, and the fact that negative events have a greater impact on people than positive events (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001). The first reason for the neglect of POS in terms of measurement and instrumentation is that most positively focused work in this area has been at the psychological level. Surveys have been the primary method used to gather information related to POS, with the majority of scholarly work being conceptual rather than empirical (Cameron, Dutton, & Quinn, 2003). In their article, Losada and Heaphy use a model to assess team effectiveness by observing and coding communication patterns in 60 top management teams during strategic planning sessions. The ratio of positive to negative communication varied among high, medium, and low-performing teams.

Positive teams showed better performance according to Cameron, Bright, and Caza's study, which surveyed organizations from various industries and found that those with higher scores on virtuousness outperformed others. One reason for the neglect of Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) is the misconception that its topics are non-academic. For instance, hope and optimism are sometimes misunderstood as mere wishful thinking. POS emphasizes its use of scholarship to establish its scientific and theoretical basis, aiming to document, measure, and explain positive human experiences in organizational settings.

Baumeister et al illustrated that negative events, such as losing money or receiving criticism, have a greater impact on individuals than positive events like winning money or receiving praise. The psychological effects of bad events outweigh the good ones, so neglecting problems and challenges could threaten survival. Neglecting positive events may only result in regret or disappointment (KIM S. CAMERON & CAZA, 2004)

Dinnah Pladott (2003) discusses the shift from reparative psychology to a psychology of positive experience and the emergence of Positive organizational scholarship, which focuses on the positive aspects of organizational performance and examines virtuous elements like compassion, forgiveness, dignity, and optimism. This shift reflects a new movement in psychology that emphasizes human strengths and virtues over traditional focus on illness and pathology.

Pos is focused on understanding the integration of positive and negative conditions. Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) and Positive Psychology both seek to understand flourishing, but POS specifically aims to explain flourishing in organizational contexts, including individuals, groups, units, and whole organizations. Flourishing, as defined by POS, involves being in an optimal range of human functioning, which is demonstrated at the individual level by goodness, generativity, growth, and resilience.

At the group and organizational level, flourishing can be demonstrated by creativity, innovation, growth, resilience, virtuous behavior, or other signs that a collective is thriving and performing exceptionally well. Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) emphasizes enhancing individual, group, and collective strengths that reflect excellence. POS brings together various areas of organizational research that center on flourishing, including factors like creativity, engagement, flow, growth, health, and well-being in the organization, group, and job settings.