Chapter 4
The Emergence of Positive Management
“You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” That was the advice of my dear, departed mother, who may have been onto something. Implementing positive management (PM) is not so simple as catching flies, but this chapter will make clear why it is worth the effort.
Positive Psychology
Many college premeds take a course called Abnormal Psychology. I remember wondering, as an undergrad, why there wasn’t a course called Normal Psychology. It seemed silly that there was an important and popular course in college with the word abnormal in the title and a little creepy that there was enough “not normal” stuff going on in people’s heads to justify a semester-long course in it. Those were the clueless meanderings of a 19-year-old, but it turns out that a person with a lot more skin in the psychology game ended up wondering the same thing.
Starting in the 1970s, Martin E. P. Seligman studied learned helplessness, seeking to learn how it might be prevented rather than just cured. That interest moved to the study of optimism and, in the 1990s, to the idea of positive psychology. Seligman expanded on previous ideas from humanistic psychology and focused on the importance of happiness and well-being. By his definition, positive psychology is composed of three main areas: positive emotions, positive individual traits, and positive institutions. In justifying a significant shift in focus for the field of psychology, Seligman noted that it had somehow veered to the fixing-what-is-wrong side of its mission—curing mental illness—and forgotten that it historically had more positive purposes as well, including nurturing talent and making the lives of people more fulfilling.
The focus on the negative that Seligman criticized had not been in effect for very long. After World War II, psychologists started to focus on the field’s ability to cure dysfunction. No question about it, this was massively important to society and added to the field’s value. Helping people to not be obsessed, angry, fearful, and depressed is a contribution so great that it is difficult to even get our heads around it. But it came at cost. The old saw says, “When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.” Seligman’s view characterized the field as having a hammer mainly capable of pounding down the nails of dysfunction.
The problem with focusing on dysfunction was simple and, now that it is on its way to being rectified, seemingly obvious: Most people are not dysfunctional or, if you want to put a tougher standard on it, most people are not dysfunctional most of the time. Seligman focused on important questions: “What are we as a profession doing for people who aren’t dysfunctional?” and “What can we do to sustain mental health instead of just trying to fix it?”
In 1998, Seligman served as president of the American Psychological Association and made a more positive focus for the field his theme for the year.1 Within a couple of years, the subfield of positive psychology was born. It has been very well received in two important ways. First, it is very popular, having been a cover story for Time and U.S. News & World Report and covered extensively by other print and electronic media. Second, and much more important for our purposes here, Seligman’s (and his colleagues’) theories have been supported in empirical research.2 Among the findings are that being optimistic and thinking positively can lead to better performance.
Transfer From Psychology to Management
Management, and especially its subfield of organizational behavior, is heavily dependent on psychological principles. Not surprisingly, a big development in the field of psychology soon resulted in new ideas in management and in the reinforcement of theories already under development.
The focus of leading researchers in the field of positive organizational scholarship (POS)3 has been on understanding PM—what it is and what it could mean to organizations. A significant part of the writing and theorizing so far has focused on the following:
- Development and testing of theory
- Ethics, virtue, and compassion
- Synergy (i.e., the creation of something larger and more abundant via a focus on positivity)
This book is not focused on extending theory but is strongly oriented toward practice. My approach shares with fundamental theory-building research a belief that positive approaches can result in superior organizational function but is more concerned with how rather than with why. At this point in our economic and organizational history, and considering the development of a new and potentially valuable branch of the field of management, it is time to put PM into practice.
Positive Organizational Scholarship
POS is most closely associated with the University of Michigan and specifically with Dr. Kim Cameron and his colleagues. POS seeks to develop theories, empirical tests, and educational applications about positive approaches in organizations. These include research on attitudes, behaviors, personalities, interpersonal relations, and how organizations characterize and remember outcomes. The Michigan program has a strong scientific orientation and has produced generalizable findings about positive approaches in organizations. Seligman’s focus in psychology was on human strengths, virtues, and positive affect. Describing parallels in POS, Cameron said that it “investigates positive deviance, or the ways in which organizations and their members flourish and prosper in extraordinary ways.”4
Appreciative Inquiry
When Seligman developed his ideas about a greater need for positive thinking in psychology, he focused on individual people as the unit of analysis. A related set of ideas had earlier been introduced in management, with the unit of analysis being the organization. David Cooperrider earned his doctorate in Organizational Behavior at Case Western Reserve University by developing appreciative inquiry (AI),5 an idea that organizations should be viewed as bundles of opportunity instead of generators of problems to be solved. As the concept developed, it became closely associated with organizational development (OD).
The need for the changes that Cooperrider suggested for OD was clear. The focus of the field can be very negative. In a number of organizations, managers don’t want OD specialists to come calling, because it means that “something is wrong.” I’ve observed OD interventions that dealt with sexual harassment, racism, and dysfunctional relationships so severe that they exceeded the ability of supervisors to handle them.
Cooperrider, using principles espoused by Albert Schweitzer, saw a different purpose and outcome for OD. In the way that Seligman argued that psychology was ignoring positive outcomes and opportunities and that Cameron and colleagues later argued that management should focus on organizations as sources of positive outcomes, Cooperrider argued that OD should focus organization members’ attention on the good the organization could do.
Cooperrider’s initial presentations were not well received. The AI website6 reports that some attendees at his initial Academy of Management presentation described his ideas as Pollyannaish, a reference to the Eleanor Porter character who sees only the good in everything. Over time and with solid case study support, the idea gained traction and has had a significant impact on the field of OD.7
Positive Organizational Behavior
Perhaps most closely related to the topics covered in this book is the growing field of positive organizational behavior (POB) pioneered by Fred Luthans and colleagues, which deals with specific workplace techniques to influence employee behaviors. Luthans has argued8 that the psychological states of employees should be treated as intangible assets and, as such, measured and optimized.
The approach that I am using in this book is not precisely compatible with the work of the POS, AI, and POB researchers. It is not as scientific and evidence-based, but it relies on the incorporation and interpretation of PM ideas into your own experience and observations. It also differs in another crucial aspect. POS and AI approach the introduction of positive approaches in organizations from a unique perspective; they view the organization as a vessel with a finite capacity to contain quantities of positivity and negativity. A recurring theme in these subfields is that flooding the organization with positivity will result in the dilution or elimination of negativity from this finite vessel. I have departed significantly from the POS and AI approaches by contrasting arguments in favor of PM with what is often found in organizations—negative techniques and environments. My reasoning for this is twofold. First, it is difficult intellectually and conceptually to argue in favor of significant change without contrasting what is being proposed to what exists now. Second, many managers will find it very difficult to accept implementation of positive techniques without being persuaded about the weaknesses of the techniques that are in place. POS in particular acknowledges the existence of negative contexts, frameworks, and behaviors, but it does not attack them. I do.
Though my recommendations are not exactly in parallel with the POS, AI, and POB approaches, I cannot recommend adoption of positive techniques without thorough investigation of the theory building, testing, and practical training that these researchers have done.
Suggested Reading
Appreciative Inquiry Commons at Case Western Reserve University. http://appreciativeinquiry.case.edu/intro/default.cfm
Cameron, K. (2008). Positive leadership. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.
Cameron, K., Dutton, J., & Quinn, R. (Eds.). (2003). Positive organizational scholarship: Foundations of a new discipline. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.
Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship at the University of Michigan. http://www.bus.umich.edu/Positive/
Cooperrider, D., Sorensen, P., Jr., Whitney, D., & Yaeger, T. (Eds.). (1999). Appreciative inquiry: Rethinking human organization toward a positive theory of change. Champaign, IL: Stipes Publishing.
Dutton, J., & Ragins, B. (Eds.). (2007). Exploring positive relationships at work. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Hammond, S. A. (1998). The thin book of appreciative inquiry. Plano, TX: Thin Book Publishing.
Luthans, F. (2002). The need for and meaning of positive organizational behavior. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 23, 695–706.
Nelson, D., Little, L., & Frazier, M. L. (2008). Employee well-being: The heart of positive organizational behavior. In C. Cooper, A. Kinder, & R. Hughes (Eds.), Employee well-being support: A workplace resource (pp. 51–60). Chichester, England: John Wiley and Sons.
Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. http://www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/index.html