Leading The Positive Organization

Thomas N. Duening

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781631573255
• eBook ISBN: 9781631573262
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

Positive psychology and positive organizational scholarship have begun to have an impact on the enterprise. It is important for organizational leaders at all levels to understand this powerful new framework. This volume brings together a wide range of organizational scholars who have derived implications from positive research for the modern enterprise. Engaging topics from leadership, to self-esteem, and to conflict resolution, this book provides practical tools, actions, and processes that can be used to create positive organizations.

CHAPTER 1

The Positive Organization: Why It’s Not More of the Same

Thomas N. Duening

If we want to change the way organizations work, we need to learn deeply, embrace fully, and communicate effectively this positive research.¹

Introduction

Organizational theory is a term that many business practitioners loathe. There is a prevailing notion that anything that is “merely” a theory cannot have substantive implications for practice. At the same time, most business practitioners readily adopt popular organizational theories in the hope that it will arm them with insights to transform their own organizations.

This ambivalence about organizational theory is easy to understand. The bookshelves in the business section of the local bookstore burst with an ever-growing number of volumes promising to reveal the latest secrets, insights, or rules that once and for all will ensure high performance. How is one to choose among these various alternative approaches? What is the evidence that backs up their lofty claims?

Business leader skepticism should be high when it comes to claims about the latest breakthrough in creating high-performing organizations. A review of the past 30 years of such epiphanies reveals a mostly dismal record of lasting performance enhancements. Some of the organizational theories have more substance than others, to be sure. For example, it’s likely that most readers of this book have heard of W. Edwards Deming and the total quality management revolution he helped to usher in following World War II.² The transformations that many companies experienced as a result of adopting Deming’s ideas and prescriptions were vitally important at the time. Today, Deming and total quality management don’t sell well because most organizations have adopted quality processes, practices, and controls as a routine part of their operations. It is no longer revolutionary to say that one has adopted quality as a centerpiece of competitive advantage; it is the entry price to nearly any industry.

Readers may also recall several other noteworthy organizational theories that have appeared and faded over the past few decades:

• Business Process Reengineering (Hammer and Champy)³

• The One-Minute Manager (Blanchard)⁴

• In Search of Excellence (Peters and Waterman)⁵

• Competitive Advantage (Porter)⁶

• Management by Objectives (Drucker)⁷

Of course, there are many more beyond this short list. If you find yourself weary of organizational theory, you are not alone. In fact, some scholars have written insightful critiques of the tendency for practitioners to become beguiled by the latest fads in organizational theory.⁸

We have collaborated to write this book on positive organizational behavior (POB), because we believe this organizational theory is more powerful than the others noted earlier, and it is based on substantial evidence from the human sciences. In fact, a large part of its power and potency derives from the fact that it is rooted in the ultimate causes of human behavior. Ultimate causation links human behaviors to the evolutionary origins of the motivations and mechanisms underlying them. Traditional management and leadership scholarship has suffered from a lack of integration of evolutionary insights into organizational theory.⁹

POB is not a theory designed to dig us out of some contemporary organizational hole created by other, now defunct, theories. It is not a theory that is merely a function of the times in which we live. Rather, POB is based on scientific insights into how human beings actually function and flourish, and into the evolutionary (ultimate) and cultural (proximate) causes that underlie these elementary facts of life. For instance, research has demonstrated a powerful cross-species motivation in all animals, including humans, that drives them to understand their environment. This fundamental “EXPLORATION” motivation has been demonstrated to be an ancestral part of all mammalian brains.¹⁰ [Note: The capitalization convention for describing ancestral emotional systems is used to denote that we may have a wide range of alternative terms for describing these innate systems.] Engaging in EXPLORATION-related behaviors is rewarding to most mammals—creating positive feelings—and is, in fact, one of the more powerful of the emotional/motivational (E/M) systems common to all mammals (see more on this below).

Just as there is nothing that time-bounds the mammalian and, therefore, human motivation energized by the innate EXPLORATION system, there is nothing that time-bounds the human desire to function at optimal levels. Human flourishing is part of our natural inclination to understand and make the best possible use of our individual talents to achieve personal and social goals regardless of the environment—organizational or natural—in which we find ourselves.

In this chapter, I’ll first highlight several important foregrounding advances in the human sciences that indicate why POB differs from other management fads in its scientific foundations. The first of these advances is positive psychology (PP). PP increasingly is being recognized as a fresh new understanding of the human condition and how individuals can optimize their talents.

The second advance is based on the evolutionary understanding of the human E/M systems. Important new discoveries based on both human and animal studies have revealed a primary, genetically inherited E/M architecture that underlies all human actions and cognitions. These discoveries have been hard-won over the past several decades and are now beginning to bear significant fruit for those interested in the implications for organizational behavior and for individual and group flourishing.

Let’s begin with a brief overview of the emerging science of PP.

Positive Psychology

I now think that the topic of positive psychology is well-being, that the gold standard for measuring well-being is flourishing, and that the goal of positive psychology is to increase flourishing.¹¹

Psychologists Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi originated the discipline of PP at the 1998 annual meeting of the American Psychological Association.¹² In a nutshell, PP focuses on helping people advance from normal to optimal functioning. Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi said PP “is about identifying and nurturing [a person’s] strongest qualities, what they own and are best at, and helping them find niches in which they can best live out these strengths.”¹³ This is in stark contrast to traditional psychology and its focus on human dysfunction and psychological maladaptations. Figure 1.1 highlights the difference between traditional and PP.

As this figure shows, clinical psychology is concerned with mental illness, mental disorders, and other dysfunctions. Organizational leaders, taking their cues from decades of psychological research into human capital and its relationship to organizational performance, also were prone to focusing on helping people who were situated to the left in this figure. This has been referred to as the four D’s approach to leading (damage, disease, disorder, and dysfunction). The four D’s approach tends to focus on “preventing poor performance, low motivation, ill-health, and disengagement.”¹⁴

By way of contrast, PP focuses on the right side of Figure 1.1. According to Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, the purpose of PP “is to begin to catalyze a change in the focus of psychology from preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building positive qualities.” We emphasize here the difference between PP and other management fads such as “positive thinking.” The latter were never part of the scholarly literature, and much of the popular approaches to “positivity” have come to be viewed “with doubt and suspicion—a product of wishful thinking, denial, or even ‘hucksterism.’”¹⁵ Management scholar Fred Luthans highlights that PP differs from “feel good” positive approaches to human psychology in “its heritage of insisting on sound theory and research before moving on to application and practice.”¹⁶

Figure 1.1 The continuum from mental illness to flourishing

Negative versus Positive Organizational Behavior

For purposes of developing the negative–positive contrast in the realm of organizational performance, consider two organizational behavior typologies that have been developed by scholars. One focuses on deviancy in the workplace, the other on positive behaviors in the workplace.

Researchers Sandra Robinson and Rebecca Bennett developed the employee deviancy typology.¹⁷ They defined employee deviance as “voluntary behavior that violates significant organizational norms and in so doing threatens the well-being of an organization.”¹⁸ Notice that the researchers distinctly linked deviant behavior to potential harms to the organization. Their research was based on surveys and interviews with full-time employees whose average age was 37. They discovered that the deviant behaviors reported by the study participants ranged on a two-dimensional scale between minor and serious and between interpersonal and organizational. The typology that emerged from the research is provided as Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2 Typology of employee deviant behavior¹⁹

No doubt you’ve seen some of these deviant behaviors before. They are common among employees who don’t have opportunities to flourish at work.

By way of contrast, a focus on POB has led to the development of a positive typology. Luthans and Youssef give us a typology of positive workplace behavior that is encapsulated under the acronym CHOSE (confidence/self-efficacy, hope, optimism, subjective well-being, and emotional intelligence) (Figure 1.3).²⁰

Figure 1.3 Luthans’s CHOSE positive employee behavior typology²¹

Obviously there is a vast sea of difference between the employee behaviors noted in the deviance typology from those in the positive typology. The question for organizational leaders is how to promote the positive over the negative. In the literature of PP, the way people behave is the starting point for positive outcomes. Behavior can be guided, both by the individual and by the organization, via commitment to a set of virtues and character strengths. We next talk about a set of virtues that has been identified in the PP research as being linked to human flourishing.

Virtues and Character Strengths

One of the primary topics of PP research is the identification of the virtues that are correlated with high-functioning human beings. The technical definition of “virtue” offered by the positive psychologists is “A disposition to act, desire, and feel that involves the exercise of judgment and leads to a recognizable human excellence or instance of human flourishing. Moreover, virtuous activity involves choosing virtue for itself and in light of some justifiable life plan.”²² Significantly, virtues represent character strengths (i.e., trait-like attributes that are at least partially malleable) and are substantively different from personality traits (i.e., inherited attributes that are unchanging). The continuum from psychological states to psychological traits is highlighted in Figure 1.4.²³

Psychological states, such as moods, are changeable and momentary. Stat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 The Positive Organization: Why It’s Not More of the Same
• Part I Positive Organizational Culture
• Part II Positive Organizational Communications
• Part III Positive Organizational Transformation
• About the Authors
• Index