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Organizational researchers studying well-being – as well as organizations themselves – often place much of the burden on employees to manage and preserve their own well-being. Missing from this discussion is how – from a human resources management (HRM) perspective – organizations and managers can directly and positively shape the well-being of their employees. The authors use this review to paint a picture of what organizations could be like if they valued people holistically and embraced the full experience of employees’ lives to promote well-being at work. In so doing, the authors tackle five challenges that managers may have to help their employees navigate, but to date have received more limited empirical and theoretical attention from an HRM perspective: (1) recovery at work; (2) women’s health; (3) concealable stigmas; (4) caregiving; and (5) coping with socio-environmental jolts. In each section, the authors highlight how past research has treated managerial or organizational support on these topics, and pave the way for where research needs to advance from an HRM perspective. The authors conclude with ideas for tackling these issues methodologically and analytically, highlighting ways to recruit and support more vulnerable samples that are encapsulated within these topics, as well as analytic approaches to study employee experiences more holistically. In sum, this review represents a call for organizations to now – more than ever – build thriving organizations.

Based on positive organizational scholarship, this study aims to examine the role of faculty engagement in mediating the relationship between quality of work-life (QWL) and organizational commitment. The paper also analyses how spiritual leadership moderates the relationship between QWL and faculty engagement.

The data was collected through structured questionnaires from undergraduate and postgraduate teachers working in various business schools across major cities in India. The sample was selected through the snowball sampling technique. The sample size was 486, and analysis was done through the structural equation modelling approach using the bootstrapping method.

Findings indicate that faculty engagement mediates the relationship between QWL and organizational commitment among teachers. Furthermore, results show that educational institutions that practice spiritual leadership support higher positive psychological and emotional states of engagement.

The paper provides an integrated model of engagement, commitment and QWL through a study of mediation and moderation effects and adds value to the psychology and workplace spirituality literature. There is the future scope for further generalizations of the model in different geographical contexts to analyse the influence of other leadership styles.

Furthermore, it would help educational institutions to design QWL strategies for engaging teachers psychologically, emotionally and cognitively by accelerating employees’ positive emotions and behaviours. Finally, the paper shows implications for developing the QWL strategies to create a committed and engaged workforce through spiritual leadership.

The paper contributes to the academic literature by investigating interrelationships among variables from a positive organizational scholarship perspective. The paper would help practitioners to comprehend the importance of spiritual leadership in educational institutions.

This study aims to investigate the positive side of employee deviance. Historically, research exploring employee deviance focussed on undesirable organisational and individual outcomes. Thus, previous research has empirically established that employee deviance harms both the organisation and organisation's employees. Recent studies argue that employee deviance also has a positive effect; however, such studies are limited in number. The extant research fails to consider the positive side of employee deviance, and therefore, the present studies bridge the gap through a systematic literature review on positive deviance.

The study examined peer-reviewed theoretical and empirical journal articles related to workplace deviance. An initial search resulted in 2,691 research articles, of which 40 papers were considered relevant for the study given the objective of this paper. Research papers were extracted from the Web of Science, EBSCO and Scopus. The extracted data were then synthesised to formulate the research questions and objectives for this study.

Basing on the systematic literature review, the study presents six main themes: positive deviance and younger workforce, positive deviant leader and subordinates and positive deviance as a strategic tool for employee engagement, positive deviance and positive organisational scholarship, positive deviance and entrepreneurial orientation. The study also proposes positive deviance as a mediator/moderator of other relationships within an organisation.

Systematic literature is a methodology that relies on the availability and accessibility of research studies based on the research criteria. The study considered three significant databases to identify the relevant papers for the study. Therefore, the research is limited, and the possibility of omitting the papers is not ruled out, although unintentional.

The paper is plausibly the first research to conduct a systematic literature review on positive deviance. The study establishes and reconfirms the encouraging side of employee deviance. The study extends the literature on workplace deviance in two significant ways. First, the paper systematically examines the empirical and review literature related to positive deviance and presents a greater understanding of the predictors, consequences, methodologies, etc. Second, the study highlights the critical research gaps in this area and suggests the course of action for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of the perceived authentic leadership of supervisors and employees’ core self-evaluations on their organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and to examine the role of psychological empowerment as a partial mediator of those relationships.

A cross-sectional survey was used to obtain individual perceptions from employees working in one of the biggest companies in Korea. Data from 374 samples was analyzed. Construct validity of each measurement model is examined using confirmatory factor analysis and the hypothesized structural model is tested by structural equation modeling.

The authors found that perceived authentic leadership, core self-evaluation, and employees’ psychological empowerment had significant impact on employees’ OCB, accounting for 58 percent of the variance in OCB. In addition, 54 percent of the variance in psychological empowerment was explained by authentic leadership and core self-evaluations, partially mediating the relationship between authentic leadership and OCB and the relationship between core self-evaluations and OCB.

Positivity is instrumental in driving intrinsic motivation for work and voluntary devotion to colleagues and organizations. This study contributed to the emerging research branch of management and organizational psychology such as positive organization scholarship and positive organizational behavior by exploring the relationship among the relevant constructs. More specifically, the authors found that positive contextual factor (i.e. authentic leadership), positive personality factor (i.e. core self-evaluations), and positive work experience (i.e. psychological empowerment) do have positive influence on employees’ extra-role performance (i.e. OCB).

This chapter traces the author's journey of change research from positivism to pragmatism and how different types of “engaged scholarship” shape how we know and do change. It takes readers through the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of different types of research and how these were expressed in studies of planned change interventions, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), cynicism and its consequences, “soul work” and community building in business, organizational transformation, and the development of more socially and environmentally conscious people, purposes, and practices. The paper reflects on the author's research as it relates to regulatory versus radical change and whose interests are and might be served by change research.

The role and potential contribution of a positive lens to the design of systems and organizations is the focus of this essay. The positive lens refers to an emerging perspective in the social sciences that emphasizes a positive stance toward our capacity to construct better organizations and technologies through a positive discourse. Joining a positive lens onto organizing with the transformative power of design thinking opens new horizons and uncovers previously overlooked possibilities for creating organizational and social well-being. We discuss the core practices that drive design and argue that they hold the key for applying a positive design attitude.

While previous studies have primarily assumed dysfunctional effects of cultural distance in joint ventures and M&A, this paper elucidates from a positive organizational scholarship perspective how perceived cultural distance can advance firms’ new product development within non-equity alliances. The purpose of this paper is to explain how perceived cultural distance stimulates task discourse that supports alliance partners’ employees in recognizing and applying culture-related differences as complementary problem-solving potentials. Due to a lower integration level in non-equity alliances compared to joint ventures or M&A, this paper assumes that the positive effects outweigh the negative effects of cultural distance.

This study applies structural equation modeling to test the hypothesized effects on a sample of 246 international alliances in the manufacturing industry.

The analysis mainly supports the hypothesized model and unravels how positive effects can emerge from perceived cultural distance.

The findings provide managerial implications. Alliance managers should note that cultural distance can have positive and negative effects, and thus it is not a barrier per se in alliances. Firms can benefit from cultural distance if they are able to leverage culture-specific complementarities through task discourse among partners in alliances.

The manuscript uses a unique data set of 246 international alliances from the global manufacturing industry. The manuscript has not been published elsewhere.

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.

In February 2015, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, CEO of the LEGO Group, invited the national and international press to a financial briefing at the company's headquarters in Billund (Denmark). 2014 had been an exceptional year of growth for the LEGO group. Nevertheless, most of the journalists present in the room were surprised when the Danish CEO suddenly began to dance in front of the audience while singing ‘Everything is awesome’ from the LEGO Movie. Why did he do it? Was it out of spontaneous joy? Or was there a strategy behind his actions? And what were the reactions of the media and LEGO employees? What can a CEO who is dancing and singing for a few seconds or minutes in front of a group of journalists tell us about leadership roles and leadership communication? The aim of this chapter is to provide plausible answers to these questions. We combine theory of dancing with three different approaches to the study of leadership: (1) a strategic approach: the CEO as a Performer, (2) a positive organizational scholarship approach: the CEO as a Chief Happiness Officer and (3) a critical approach: the CEO as a Seducer. At the end of the chapter, we discuss how this small case study can contribute to a broader understanding of strategic communication that includes a dramaturgical and multimodal perspective.

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.