The Positive Organization
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The Book

Your current organization is not static. It is continually becoming more negative or more positive. As organizations become more negative, the people within them tend to withdraw and underperform. As organizations become more positive, their people tend to invest and exceed individual and collective expectations.

The purpose of this book is to help create the second kind of organization. It not only illustrates how this is done in real organizations but also explains how to invite people to purpose, how to bring about authentic conversations, how to connect people to new possibilities, how to orient them to the common good, and how to facilitate the emergence of new, more positive cultures. In 2003, Kim Cameron, Jane Dutton, and I published a book called Positive Organizational Scholarship: Foundations of a New Discipline. It was a call for academics to study individuals, groups, and organizations at their very best. Since then, the field has come into its own, and many scholars do research on the topic. In 2012, Kim Cameron and Gretchen Spreitzer published The Oxford Handbook of Positive Organizational Scholarship, which contains more than 80 chapters of scientific literature reviews and illustrates how much the field has grown. The central hub for this global research network is the Center for Positive Organizations at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. The Center for Positive Organizations encourages research, develops applied tools, works with companies to improve their culture, and provides educational experiences for students. See Kim S. Cameron, Jane Dutton, and Robert E. Quinn (Eds.), Positive Organizational Scholarship: Foundations of a New Discipline (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2003); and Kim S. Cameron and Gretchen M. Spreitzer (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Positive Organizational Scholarship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), http://positiveorgs.bus.umich.edu/.

The appendix contains a useful tool called the Positive Organization Generator. It includes 100 positive practices from real organizations. It is designed so the reader can create new practices that can be implemented in any context without having to ask for permission from someone of higher authority.

At the end of each chapter, you will be asked to think about a key insight you gained and how it can help you to create a more positive organization. It is important to follow through on this, because it will help you envision the organization you want to create as you use the Positive Organization Generator.

There are also other tools for readers. At the end of chapters 3 through 7, there are assessments and activities you can use to introduce your unit or team to the concepts in this volume.

In the end, this book does two things. First, it introduces ideas designed to challenge your conventional assumptions. Second, it offers real tools and simple processes designed to support you in trying new things.

Deep learning can occur when both challenge and support are present. As you begin to conceptualize new practices and to see things from a more complex mental map, you will be able to transform yourself, your unit, and even your organization. If that happens, you and your people will never be the same. Your people will begin to flourish and exceed expectations. They will become fully engaged and continually renewed, The central question of this book is how to embrace and act from the positive mindset so as to create a more positive or excellent organization. In a recent book, Sutton and Rao address the same question: they ask how constructive beliefs can be spread from the few to the many, and they show how to build and uncover pockets of excellence in an organization. Their book takes a different approach but is a very useful supplement to this one. In terms of leadership, Kim Cameron has written two books that articulate positive strategies and practices. Both books supplement this one nicely, as well. See Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao, Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More without Settling for Less (New York: Crown Business, 2014); Kim S. Cameron, Positive Leadership: Strategies for Extraordinary Performance, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2012); and Kim S. Cameron, Practicing Positive Leadership: Tools and Techniques That Create Extraordinary Results (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2013).　　Jane Dutton and Gretchen Spreitzer have also produced a very helpful volume; see Jane E. Dutton and Gretchen M. Spreitzer (Eds.), How to Be a Positive Leader: Insights from Leading Thinkers on Positive Organizations (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2014). and a more positive organization will emerge.

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