What are the characteristics, practices and principles that create thriving organizations? Positive Organizational Scholarship tells us that prioritizing employee health and wellbeing is essential to both employee and organization success. Research is shedding new light on how workplace connections, compassion and cooperation are key to culture and improved outcomes.
Positive Organizations
How to Energize Your Workplace
This book uses energy as a measurement to describe the power of positive and negative connections in people's experiences at work. Dutton provides three pathways for turning negative connections into positive ones that create and sustain employee resilience and flexibility, facilitate speed and quality of learning, and build individual commitment and cooperation.
Energize Your Workplace: How To Build and Sustain High-Quality Connections at Work
Corrosive work relationships are like black holes that swallow upenergy that people need to do their jobs. In contrast, high-qualityrelationships generate and sustain energy, equipping people to dowork and do it well. Grounded in solid research, this book uses energy as ameasurement to describe the power of positive and negativeconnections in people's experience at work. Author Jane Duttonprovides three pathways for turning negative connections intopositive ones that create and sustain employee resilience andflexibility, facilitate the speed and quality of learning, andbuild individual commitment and cooperation. Through compelling and illustrative stories, Energize YourWorkplace offers managers, executives, and human resourceprofessionals the resources they need to build high-qualityconnections in the workplace.
Dutton, J. E. 2003. Energize your workplace: How to build and sustain high-quality connections at work. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
The Effects of Compassion at Work
This study systematically documents the effects of compassion on daily work, meanings, attitudes, and behaviors. Findings show the powerful ways that small interpersonal acts of healing infuse individuals and their workplace with meaning and psychological resources.
What Good is Compassion at Work?
This paper presents two views on the effects of compassion at work. The first view presents a quantitative model, indicating that experienced compassion relates to employee and organizational outcomes. Through analysis of compassion stories, the second view reveals mechanisms through which compassion has its effects, uncovering how acts of compassion are cues for sensemaking about the self, co-workers, and the organization. Together, the two views provide evidence that acts of compassion at work create important effects.
Lilius, J. M., Worline, M. C. Dutton, J. E., Kanov, J., Frost, P. J., Maitlis, S. (2003), What Good is Compassion at Work?
Compassion in the Workplace
This paper dives into two studies that explore compassion at work, highlighting the contours of compassion at work and providing evidence for its powerful consequences. One study found that compassion occurs with relative frequency among a wide variety of individuals, suggesting a relationship between experienced compassion, positive emotion, and affective commitment. Another study shows a wide range of compassion triggers and highlights ways that work collegues respond to suffering.
The Contours and Consequences of Compassion at Work
This paper describes two studies that explore core questions about compassion at work. Findings from a pilot survey indicate that compassion occurs with relative frequency among a wide variety of individuals, suggesting a relationship between experienced compassion, positive emotion, and affective commitment. A complementary narrative study reveals a wide range of compassion triggers and illuminates ways that work colleagues respond to suffering. The narrative analysis demonstrates that experienced compassion provides important sensemaking occasions where employees who receive, witness, or participate in the delivery of compassion reshape understandings of their co-workers, themselves, and their organizations. Together these studies map the contours of compassion at work, provide evidence of its powerful consequences, and open a horizon of new research questions.
Lilius, J. M., Worline, M. C., Maitlis, S., Kanov, J. Dutton, J. E., Frost, P., (2008), The Contours and Consequences of Compassion at Work. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 29(2), 193-218.
