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.
Thriving describes an individual's experience of vitality and learning. The primary goal of this paper is to develop a model that illuminates the social embeddedness of employees' thriving at work. First, we explain why thriving is a useful theoretical construct, define thriving, and compare it to related constructs, including resilience, flourishing, subjective well-being, flow, and self-actualization. Second, we describe how work contexts facilitate agentic work behaviors, which in turn produce resources in the doing of work and serve as the engine of thriving. Third, we describe how thriving serves as a gauge to facilitate self-adaptation at work. We conclude by highlighting key theoretical contributions of the model and suggesting directions for future research.
Human physiological systems are highly responsive to positive social interactions, but the organizational importance of this finding largely has been unexplored. After reviewing extant research, we illustrate how consideration of the physiology of positive social interactions at work opens new research questions about how positive social interactions affect human capacity and how organizational contexts affect employee health and physiological resourcefulness. We also address the practical implications of integrating physiological data into organizational research. Our paper invites a fuller consideration of how employees' bodies are affected by everyday work interactions and, in so doing, encourages a stronger tie between human physiology and organizational research.
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.
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.
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.
