Positive Organizational Scholarship

Abstract

Introduction Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) and Positive Psychology are focused on understanding the conditions and processes that explain flourishing (Gable and Haidt, 2005). What differentiates POS is an explicit interest in understanding and explaining flourishing in organizational contexts (including individuals, groups, units and whole organizations). Flourishing refers to being in an optimal range of human functioning (Keyes, 2002) and is indicated at the individual level by goodness, generativity, growth and resilience (Fredrickson & Losada, 2005). At the collective level of groups and organizations, flourishing may be indicated by creativity, innovation, growth, resilience, thriving virtuousness or other markers that a collective is healthy and is performing in an “above normal” or positively deviant range. POS also focuses on the development of individual, group and collective strengths that represent forms of individual and collective excellence. POS unites existing domains of organizational inquiry focused on flourishing. This includes work on flourishing indicators such as creativity, engagement, flow, growth, health and well-being, as well as contributors to flourishing that consider features of the organization, group and job contexts. POS opens up new topics of study, such as compassion, courage, energy and energy networks, forgiveness, resilience, thriving, and work callings—just to name a few. POS scholarship includes a growing body of theoretical work (for reviews, see Cameron & Caza, 2004; Cameron, Dutton, & Quinn, 2003) and an emerging set of empirical studies (for example, see two special issues (Cameron & Caza, 2004) and (Bakker & Schaufeli, forthcoming) and publications in mainstream organizational journals). In this brief review of POS, we will trade depth for breadth to provide the reader with a basic understanding of POS as both a domain and lens.