Books in the Positive Psychology News series
The positive functioning of groups, institutions, and organizations.
Ever since Friedman and Roseman’s 1959 study identifying the Type A personality and its link to coronary heart disease, research into the influence of personality factors on health has caught…
These researchers ask, “Whose responsibility is happiness?” It does not rest solely on the individual, and it does not emerge solely from the conditions of society. The researchers suggest co-responsibility as the answer: “The idea that happiness emerges as a collective and cooperative endeavor that requires both favorable life conditions and individual effort.”
I highly recommend this book as a source of ideas for enhancing your leadership skills, whether you lead yourself or thousands of people. The many stories of positive outcomes will help you see that you can make a difference by making small changes. Want ideas for your small change? There are more than 70 strategies and practices clearly labeled throughout the book.
According to several news reports, what Inamori did to re-engage employees and lead Japanese Airlines back into the black was to insist on compulsory philosophy sessions for all staff, washed down with free beer. I was so intrigued by this story that I wanted to delve a bit deeper. I hoped Kazuo Inamori’s business philosophy might yield some positive psychology gems like the ones I recently found with Honda.
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.
Most of us don’t realize that we have a few central narratives running through our lives because the stories we tell ourselves are so familiar that we don’t even realize they are stories. In my work with clients, I’ve found that it’s often not the events of life that allow or prevent success in love, work, and happiness. It’s the stories we tell ourselves — and we can change our stories.
With increasing demands in the workplace and a greater need for knowledge-based work, innovation, and creativity, organizations need to find ways to enable their employees to do and be their best. Positive psychology can show those in management roles how to use and develop human capital. It can also guide organizational policy and enable workers to make their best contributions. Positive psychology has been, and will continue to be, a boon to the workplace.
I was very excited to be asked to review Sue Roffey’s latest book. Previously a teacher, Roffey is now an educational psychologist, consultant, and writer. The book’s aim is to go beyond what teaching manuals usually do, which is to provide ways to manage poor pupil behavior so that it doesn’t disrupt other students’ learning. This book also provides the strategies to foster positive pupil behavior.
Do people who live in different cities really have different psychological traits and dispositions? Few psychologists have studied variation across cities before now, and those that do focus on negatives such as obesity, psychiatric disorders, and violent crime. So this new positive psychology research into city-level strengths by Nansook Park and Chris Peterson is not only interesting, but also very refreshing. As they point out, it’s high time we looked at what’s right with city life!
There has been a lot of press about health, fitness, and obesity lately. It seems like everywhere we turn, there are new stats telling us why we need to pay…
While employers would like to think that people leave their problems at home, the reality is that most people find it challenging to turn off stressors from their personal life when they get to work. Rather than ignore the home-life/work-performance connection, we argue that employers who encourage and support healthy home lives in their employees see a better return on their salary investment.
FROM YESTERDAY: The Psychologically Healthy Workplace Conference held in Washington, DC last weekend gave everyone concrete and reliable evidence to make the topic a priority. The conference showed that creating…
As a wellness consultant, one of the questions I get most often is “Wow! I love what you do! This is so important, and so needed in today’s world! What…
When my daughter, Lauren, chose her college, she picked-up on an aspect that didn’t jump out at me. I guess I was the only one surprised at how that played-out four years later and it made me curious: how does a college foster a service culture that stands out to a high school student?
Let’s assume you were just promoted into a management job. You know that you got the promotion because you were an excellent performer on your previous assignment, but it used your technical skills. You are worried that you do not have all the skills you need to be an excellent manager. How do you go about learning them? Where’s the best place to start?
I want to travel to Pandora, the fictional planet depicted in Avatar. I saw James Cameron’s newest film that has rocked box offices since its release in December on I-MAX…
Although sports mean different things to different people, most theorists and enthusiasts would agree that physical activity and sport participation can be intrinsically valuable. We learn the joy of movement…
It’s summer here in New Zealand and we’re still in holiday mode so I asked my ten year old what she thought I should write about. “Family”, she said, and…
One of the main principles of social psychology and positive psychology is that we are social creatures. On the other hand, I see a big discrepancy when I hear of…
Want to know some evidence-based methods to create stronger bonds with your co-workers? Here are effective tools and techniques from positive psychology theory and research. Most of it is simple to implement too, but does that make it easy?