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 present paper structurally estimates the impact of increased variety in the EU and Asia over the period from 1989 to 2009. Using the most disaggregated import data available, we document that the number of varieties imported by the EU, defined as the number of import categories multiplied by the average number of source countries for each category, quadrupled, whereas it sextupled in Asia. About half of this increase was due to increases in the number of categories and half due to a doubling of the number of countries from which the EU and Asia imported each good. Using the Feenstra's (1994) methodology we estimate 35,000 elasticities and then construct an aggregate price index that is robust to common changes in quality variation, the arbitrary splitting of categories, the introduction of new goods, and other data problems. After reconstructing the EU and Asia import price indices, we found that the price of the EU imports has been falling at a rate 1.24 percent per year faster than one would have thought without taking new varieties into account. The variety gains for Asia are even higher - 2.69 percent per year.

Victor Rivas

Papers

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