Although much attention has been devoted to understanding employee resistance to change, relatively little research examines the impact that positive employees can have on organizational change. To help fill this need, the authors investigate whether a process of employees’ positivity will have an impact on relevant attitudes and behaviors. Specifically, this study surveyed 132 employees from a broad cross-section of organizations and jobs and found: (a) Their psychological capital (a core factor consisting of hope, efficacy, optimism, and resilience) was related to their positive emotions that in turn were related to their attitudes (engagement and cynicism) and behaviors (organizational citizenship and deviance) relevant to organizational change; (b) mindfulness (i.e., heightened awareness) interacted with psychological capital in predicting positive emotions; and (c) positive emotions generally mediated the relationship between psychological capital and the attitudes and behaviors. The implications these findings have for positive organizational change conclude the article.

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Can Positive Employees Help Positive Organizational Change? Impact of Psychological Capital and Emotions on Relevant Attitudes and Behaviors

Developing a capacity for organizational resilience through strategic human resource management

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.

Positive organizational scholarship

This paper identifies the development of and gaps in knowledge in business and management research on resilience, based on a systematic review of influential publications among 339 papers, books and book chapters published between 1977 and 2014. Analyzing these records shows that resilience research has developed into five research streams, or lines of enquiry, which view resilience as (1) organizational responses to external threats, (2) organizational reliability, (3) employee strengths, (4) the adaptability of business models or (5) design principles that reduce supply chain vulnerabilities and disruptions. A review of the five streams suggests three key findings: First, resilience has been conceptualized quite differently across studies, meaning that the different research streams have developed their own definitions, theories and understandings of resilience. Second, conceptual similarities and differences among these streams have not yet been explored, nor have insights been gleaned about any possible generalizable principles for developing resilience. Third, resilience has been operationalized quite differently, with few insights into the empirics for detecting resilience to future adversity (or the absence thereof). This paper outlines emerging research trends and pathways for future research, highlighting opportunities to integrate and expand on existing knowledge, as well as avenues for further investigation of resilience in business and management studies.

Resilience in business and management research: a review of influential publications and a research agenda

Research on crisis management and resilience has sought to explain how individuals and organizations anticipate and respond to adversity, yet—surprisingly—there has been little integration across t...

Organizational response to adversity: Fusing crisis management and resilience research streams

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, affected the U.S. airline industry more than almost any other industry. Certain airlines emerged successful and demonstrated remarkable resilience while others languished. This investigation identifies reasons why some airline companies recovered successfully after the attacks while others struggled. Evidence is provided that layoffs after the crisis, although intended to foster recovery, instead inhibited recovery throughout the 4 years after the crisis. But, layoffs after the crisis were strongly correlated with lack of financial reserves and lack of a viable business model prior to the crisis. Digging deeper, the authors find that having a viable business model itself depended on the development and preservation of relational reserves over time. Our model shows that the maintenance of adequate financial reserves enables the preservation of relational reserves and vice versa, contributing to organizational resilience in times of crisis.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/142505/1/EERI_RP_2005_06.pdf

Relationships, Layoffs, and Organizational Resilience Airline Industry Responses to September 11

The terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001 affected the U.S. airline industry more than almost any other industry. Certain of these companies emerged successful, however, and demonstrated remarkable resilience while others languished. This investigation identifies the reasons why some airline companies recovered successfully after the attacks while others struggled. Evidence is provided that layoffs after the crisis, while intended to foster recovery, instead inhibited recovery throughout the four years after the crisis. But layoffs after the crisis were strongly correlated with the lack of financial reserves and the lack of a viable business model prior to the crisis. Digging deeper, we find that having a viable business model itself depended on the extent to which positive employee relationships had been achieved and maintained over the long term. One implication of our findings is that layoffs, while reducing costs in the short term, may also undermine the positive relationships that are critical for achieving lasting recovery.

Relationships, Layoffs, and Organizational Resilience: Airline Industry Responses to September 11

This original collection examines the managerial and organizational implications of international terrorism and threats to security. When Islamic terrorists flew hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center on 9/11, it changed much of the world forever. The number of deaths and the financial losses resulting from the attack was unprecedented. 9/11 highlighted how risky life in organizations had become.

Airline Industry Responses to September 11th

In this article we develop a simple analytically solvable model of heterogeneous firms. The heterogeneous firm framework presented in this paper is particularly suitable for the structural estimation of variety gains from trade integration, as all structural equations for empirical estimations can be directly derived from the theoretical model.

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Victor Rivas

Papers

Relationships, Layoffs, and Organizational Resilience Airline Industry Responses to September 11

Relationships, Layoffs, and Organizational Resilience: Airline Industry Responses to September 11

Airline Industry Responses to September 11th

Structural Estimation of Variety Gains from Trade Integration in a Heterogeneous Firms Framework

Airline Industry Responses to September 11th