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During the past decade, the winds and raucous waves of positive psychology have altered the landscape and brought new life to the profession and discipline of psychology. Since Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) proffered the positive psychology manifesto at the turn of the century, an amazing plethora of books, articles, research investigations, grants, awards, and applications for improving human welfare and society at large have emerged (see Donaldson, 2011a). Sheldon, Kashdan, and Steger (2011) fully described this impressive groundswell of positive psychology activity in their recent edited volume on Designing positive psychology: Taking stock and moving forward. This rapid growth of scholarly activity has also spawned new professional societies such as the International Association of Positive Psychology (http://www.ippanetwork.org/Home/), scholarly journals including the Journal of Positive Psychology (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/17439760.asp) and Journal of Happiness Studies (http://www.springer.com/social+sciences/well-being/journal/10902), and top tier graduate programs such as the Masters of Applied Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the MA and PhD programs in Positive Organizational Psychology and Positive Developmental Psychology at Claremont Graduate University. All of these efforts share the desire to better organize and foster the continued growth and impact of positive psychology.

Simon L. Albrecht is a registered psychologist and has a PhD and a master’s degree in Organizational Psychology. Simon’s PhD focused on identifying the dimensions, antecedents, and consequences of organizational trust. Simon is a Senior Lecturer within the Organizational Psychology program at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. Teaching, research, and practice interests are in the areas of work engagement, organizational development and change, leadership development, culture and climate, and organizational politics. Simon has published in numerous international journals, has numerous book chapters in print, and has presented at international conferences. In addition to his academic and research interests Simon also has considerable consultancy experience. He has previously been a director of a human resource consultancy engaged in delivering a broad range of organizational development activities and programs.

The emerging fields of positive psychology and positive organizational scholarship (POS) contribute new perspectives and approaches for leadership education and leadership development in higher education. While there are emerging empirical studies in these new fields, little connection has been made to the intellectual and practical applications for undergraduate leadership education. In this paper, the authors make a case for the intersection of leadership and positive organizational scholarship in the context of an academic course that combines theory-to-practice using a project-based learning approach. Student learning gains in this course are reported through a pre-post assessment of student’s competency and personal levels of well-being.

Over time, interest in servant leadership has increased manifold both in academic research and the popular press. These rampant developments have set the stage for addressing the worthiness of servant leadership’s theory. Empirical studies undertaken by numerous scholars (Farling et al., 1999; Bass, 2000; Page and Wong, 2000; Russell and Stone, 2002; Sendjaya and Serros, 2002; Dennis and Winston, 2003; Smith et al., 2004; Stone et al., 2004; Dennis and Bocarnea, 2005; Humphreys, 2005) have surfaced significant findings supporting relevance of servant leadership in organizational context; however, an absence of universal definition and its measures impinges on this concept. Noticeably missing from research attention has been the effect of servant leadership in promoting positive organizational behaviour among organizational employees. Thus, this paper aims to explore the available literature on servant leadership with a view to establish a servant leader’s role in instilling and facilitating positive organizational behaviour in the workplace. Moreover, the purpose is also to determine whether the positive organizational behaviour inculcated among the employees through a servant leader helps in reducing their turnover intentions.

Using different keywords, relevant research papers on Google Scholar were selected. Also, several online databases like Emerald Management, Elseiver, EBSCO Host, etc., were accessed for conducting this exploratory study.

To examine the various convergent and divergent dimensions of the major constructs, numerous definitions and scholarly work of renowned practitioners have been collated through an extensive literature review. To put forth a comprehensive picture encompassing the noteworthy findings of the studies pertaining to the major construct, a tabular representation has been made.

This is the first study wherein the linkage about servant leadership and positive organizational behaviour in organizational context has been talked about. The paper carries value as the literature pertaining to servant leadership in published domain is still in its nascent stage. The repertoire of literature, presented here, will provide a clear direction to the future researchers who wish to pursue their study in this area.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the connections between employee engagement, positive organizational psychology and an individual’s ability to adapt to ongoing organizational change.

The literature on individual adaptability, positive organizational psychology and employee engagement is reviewed. A model that suggests that a positive work culture enhances employee engagement and in specific cases leads to increased adaptability is developed.

While organizational engagement will have a positive effect on the individual’s ability to adapt to changes, job engagement will have the opposite effect, uncovering potential obstacles to change management in organizations.

Suggestions for future research are provided with the intent to further academic research in this area. This model can serve as a starting point for future research design and can be tested in organizations undergoing various changes.

A positive culture fosters both job and organizational engagement within an organization. Managers can understand how to cultivate a positive, engaged environment for employees while understanding how certain job changes might have both positive and negative effects on an individual’s ability to adapt.

A model for identifying relationships between positive organizational behaviors, two types of employee engagement (organizational engagement and job engagement) and an individual’s ability to adapt to change is helpful to researchers and practitioners alike.

Recognising the value of positive organisational behaviour at the workplace, this paper aims to provide a major review of the current state of research on positivity, and subsequently proposes new pathways for more theory building relating to important constructs conceptually related to positivity. Following the integration of emerging but disparate research on workplace positivity and related concepts, the paper develops a conceptual framework depicting the relationships amongst authentic leader behaviours, organisational virtuousness, psychological capital, thriving and job performance.

The paper offers a systematic critical review of published studies representing the literature addressing authentic leadership, organisational virtuousness, thriving, psychological capital and job performance. The paper relied on computerised keyword searches in the main business source databases of Emerald, ProQuest, ScienceDirect, EBSCOhost and SpringerLink.

This paper leads to a conceptual framework proposing direct relationships between authentic leadership, psychological capital, organisational virtuousness and job performance. Further, authentic leadership is proposed to potentially nurture organisational virtuousness, psychological capital, employee thriving and job performance, given the theoretical linkages between these conceptually relevant variables related to positivity. Additionally, organisational virtuousness and psychological capital are projected to mediate the relationship between authentic leadership and employee thriving. Finally, organisational virtuousness, psychological capital and employee thriving are designated as mediators of the relationship between authentic leadership and job performance.

This paper proposes a conceptual framework focusing on one form of positive leader behaviour and also assumes specific causal pathways using a positivistic research approach to understanding the leadership–performance relationship. The paper did not examine all possible antecedents of positivity at the workplace.

The proposed conceptual framework should form the basis of many organisational interventions, especially in relation to boosting authentic leadership, organisational virtuousness, psychological capital, employee thriving and job performance. By suggesting the association between authentic leadership, psychological capital and organisational virtuousness, this paper highlights potential benefits from effective leaders’ commitment to enhancing psychological capital and organisational virtuousness and engendering thriving behaviour and job performance.

This novel paper has the potential to stimulate the empirical studies on workplace positivity through the association of authentic leadership, psychological capital, organisational virtuousness and thriving.

Despite the now sizable body of research documenting the importance of emotions and emotion regulation in the workplace, there is relatively little research investigating methods for improving emotional well-being in organizations. Moreover, well-being interventions that have been historically predominant in psychology are deficient in a variety of ways. In light of these deficits, researchers in other areas of psychology have begun to investigate the role of self-guided activities in enhancing the positive aspects of emotional well-being and emotion regulation. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of self-guided activities and interventions. To this end, we provide a review and discussion of various theoretical ideas and specific interventions that have been, or could be, adapted into self-guided activities to boost emotions and emotional regulation skills in the workplace. The chapter is meant to provide practical guidance to employers, organizations, and individual employees interested in using self-guided activities to improve well-being and emotion regulation at work.

For many years now, both organizational researchers and practitioners alike have been interested in the role played by employee happiness on a number of workplace outcomes. In particular, many have been fascinated by the happy/productive worker thesis. According to this hypothesis, happy employees exhibit higher levels of job-related performance behaviors than do unhappy employees. However, despite decades of research, support for the happy/productive worker thesis remains equivocal. These inconsistent findings primarily result from the variety of ways in which happiness has been operationalized. Most typically, organizational theorists have operationalized happiness as job satisfaction, as the presence of positive affect, as the absence of negative affect, as the lack of emotional exhaustion, and as psychological well being. I will review this literature using the circumplex framework as the taxonomic guideline. In addition, drawing on the impetus of the “positive psychology” movement, I propose Fredrickson’s (1998, 2001, 2003) broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions as one approach especially well-suited for future research to better understand the happy/productive worker thesis.