Positive Organizational Scholarship

I find all aspects of innovation fascinating. In a chapter of the new POS Handbook titled Innovativeness as Positive Deviance authors Jeff DeGraff and Dan Nathan-Roberts look at innovativeness from several viewpoints. For example, they use the competing values framework, showing that “oppositional factors can be productively engaged to create positive tensions that yield hybrid …

In Kim Cameron’s Deviance Continuum, designed for use in businesses and other organizations, normality or healthy performance is a mid-point between positively deviant and negatively deviant performance. Negative and positive deviance are aberrations from normal functioning, problematic at one end and virtuous at the other.

In his chapter of the Oxford Handbook of Positive Organizational Scholarship, Marc Lavine defines positive deviance as “uncommon behavior that does not conform to expected norms but would be deemed positive by a referent group.” He explores a number of examples of positive deviance, mostly in social services settings, and ponders ways to increase the …

If virtuousness is excellence in the human soul, what comprises excellence in the soul of an organization or business?

When I received The Oxford Handbook of Positive Organizational Scholarship in the mail, I felt practically giddy. I tossed my bags down on the dining room table, ripped open the box, and immersed myself in 1,076 pages of richness. As an organization leader, I immediately saw the relevance of many of the ideas. I wanted …