Positive Organizational Behavior is emerging as a truly contemporary movement within the classic discipline of organizational behavior. The best work of leading scholars is gathered together in one edited collection. Chapters present the states, traits, and processes that compromise this exciting new science. In addition to mapping the field, this collection goes one step further and invites noted experts to identify the methodological challenges facing scholars of positive organizational behavior. Positive Organizational Behavior constitutes the study of positive human strengths and competencies, how it can be facilitated, assessed and managed to improve performance in the workplace . Its roots are firmly within positive psychology but transplanted to the world of work and organizations.

Positive psychology focuses on finding the best one has to offer and repairing the worst to such a degree that one becomes a more responsible, nurturing, and altruistic citizen. However, since businesses are composed of groups and networks, using positive psychology in the workplace requires applications at both the individual and the group levels. There is a need for current studies that examine the practices and efficacy of positive psychology in creating organizational harmony by increasing an individual’s wellbeing. The Handbook of Research on Positive Organizational Behavior for Improved Workplace Performance is a collection of innovative research that combines the theory and practice of positive psychology as a means of ensuring happier employees and higher productivity within an organization. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as team building, spirituality, and ethical leadership, this publication is ideally designed for human resources professionals, psychologists, entrepreneurs, executives, managers, organizational leaders, researchers, academicians, and students seeking current research on methods of nurturing talent and empowering individuals to lead more fulfilled, constructive lives within the workplace.

Positive Organizational Behaviour: A Reflective Approach introduces the most recent theoretical and empirical insights on positive organizational practices, addressing emerging topics such as resilience, job crafting, responsible leadership and mindfulness. Other books on positive approaches tend to gloss over the limitations of the positive agenda, but this textbook is unique in taking a reflective approach, focussing on the positive while also accommodating critical perspectives relating to power and control. Positive Organizational Behaviour provides an integrated conceptual framework, evidence-based findings and practical tools to gain an understanding of the potential of positive organizational practices. This innovative new textbook will provide advanced management and psychology students with a grounding in the area, and help them develop strategies for building effective and responsible organizations.

Scholarship establishes a new field of study in the organizational sciences. Just as positive psychology focuses on exploring optimal individual psychological states rather than pathological ones, Positive Organizational Scholarship focuses attention on optimal organizational states --- the dynamics in organizations that lead to the development of human strength, foster resiliency in employees, make healing, restoration, and reconciliation possible, and cultivate extraordinary individual and organizational performance. While the concept of positive organizational scholarship encompasses the examination of typical and even dysfunctional patterns of behavior, it emphasizes positive deviance from expected patterns. Positive Organizational Scholarship examines the enablers, motivations, and effects associated with remarkably positive phenomena --- how they are facilitated, why they work, how they can be identified, and how researchers and managers can capitalize on them. The contributors do not adopt one particular theory or framework but draw from the full spectrum of organizational theories to understand, explain, and predict the occurrence, causes, and consequences of positivity. Positive Organizational Scholarship rigorously seeks to understand what represents the best of the human condition based on scholarly research and theory. This book invites organizational scholars to build upon and extend the positive organizational phenomena being examined. It provides the definitional, theoretical, and empirical foundations for what will become a cumulative body of enduring work.

Our goal with this 13th Edition is to keep this first mainline organizational behavior text up-todate with the latest and relevant theory building, basic and applied research, and the best-practice applications. We give special recognition of this scientific foundation by our subtitle - An Evidence-Based Approach. As emphasized in the introductory chapter, the time has come to help narrow the theory/research—effective application/practice gap. This has been the mission from the beginning of this text. As “hard evidence” for this theory/research based text, we can say unequivocally that no other organizational behavior text has close to the number of footnote references. For example, whereas a few texts may have up to 40 or even 50 references for a few chapters, all the chapters of this text average more than twice that amount. This edition continues the tradition by incorporating recent breakthrough research to provide and add to the evidence on the theories and techniques presented throughout. Two distinguishing features that no other organizational behavior textbook can claim are the following: 1) We are committed at this stage of development of the field of OB to a comprehensive theoretical framework to structure our text. Instead of the typical potpourri of chapters and topics, there is now the opportunity to have a sound conceptual framework to present our now credible (evidence-based) body of knowledge. We use the widely recognized, very comprehensive social cognitive theory to structure this text. We present the background and theory building of this framework in the introductory chapter and also provide a specific model (Figure 1.5) that fits in all 14 chapters. Importantly, the logic of this conceptual framework requires two chapters not found in other texts and the rearrangement and combination of several others. For example, in the opening organizational context part there is Chapter 4, “Reward Systems,” and in the cognitive processes second part, Chapter 7, “Positive Organizational Behavior and Psychological Capital,” that no other text contains. 2) The second unique feature reflects our continuing basic research program over the years. Chapter 7 contains our most recent work on what we have termed “Positive Organizational Behavior” and “Psychological Capital” (or PsyCap). [The three of us introduced the term “Psychological Capital” in our joint article in 2004]. To meet the inclusion criteria (positive; theory and research based; valid measurement; open to development; and manage for performance improvement), for the first time the topics of optimism, hope, happiness/subjective well-being, resiliency, emotional intelligence, selfefficacy, and our overall core construct of psychological capital have been given chapter status. Just as real-world management can no longer afford to evolve slowly, neither can the academic side of the field. With the uncertain, very turbulent environment most organizations face today, drastically new ideas, approaches, and techniques are needed both in the practice of management and in the way we study and apply the field of organizational behavior. This text mirrors these needed changes. Social Cognitive Conceptual Framework. The book contains 14 chapters in four major parts. Social cognitive theory explains organizational behavior in terms of both environmental, contextual events and internal cognitive factors, as well as the dynamics and outcomes of the organizational behavior itself. Thus, Part One provides the evidence-based and organizational context for the study and application of organizational behavior.

Attempts to build a bridge between POB and Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS). This volume includes contributions from both fields, and theories and studies in which a positive individual perspective (POB) is combined with a positive organization perspective (POS).

An ideal resource for organizational scholars, students, practitioners, and human resource managers, this handbook covers the full spectrum of organizational theories and outcomes that define, explain, and predict the occurrence, causes, and consequences of positivity.