Happiness, Value, and Organizational Toughness: Three Concepts in Search of a Theory

Happiness—life satisfaction, subjective well-being, or welfare—is generally considered the ultimate goal of life. Research shows that happiness correlates positively with various resources, desirable characteristics, and favorable life circumstances. Happiness can influence productivity, emotions, health, self-esteem, social skills, creativity, hope, or integrity. As such, happiness seems to affect how individuals may go about their personal and professional lives. As complex social systems rely on competencies, attitudes, and behaviors to fulfill their goals, happiness affects organizations and vice versa in different ways. Resilience, flexibility, plasticity, and eventually organizational toughness can all be seen as emerging coping properties of complex adaptive systems needed to continue meeting their objectives, despite uncertainty and adversity in turbulent periods. These properties are valuable because they account for enhancing the viability and sustainability of individuals and organizations. However, the conceptual mechanisms through which happiness at work connects to value creation and organizational toughness are in short supply. In this chapter, we provide a conceptual model for addressing this complex relationship

Time to go wild: How to conceptualize and measure process dynamics in real teams with high-resolution

Team processes are interdependent activities among team members that transform inputs into outputs, vary over time, and are critical for team effectiveness. Understanding the temporal dynamics of team processes and related team phenomena with a high-resolution lens (i.e., methods with high sampling rates) is particularly challenging when going “into the wild” (i.e., studying teams operating in their full situated context). We review quantitative field studies using high-resolution methods (e.g., video, chat/text data, archival, wearables) and map out the various temporal lenses for studying team dynamics. We synthesize these different lenses and present an integrated temporal framework that is of help in theorizing about team dynamics. We also provide readers with a “how to” guide that summarizes four essential steps along with analytical methods (e.g., sequential and pattern analyses, mixed-methods research, abductive reasoning) that are applicable to the broad scope of high-resolution methods

Energizing Social Interactions at Work: An Exploration of Relationships That Generate Employee and Organizational Thriving

A company’s greatest asset is its people. In our increasingly service-based economies, social relationships and swift coordination among employees are the means by which a lot of work gets done. Thus, whether organizations -and their employees -flourish or languish largely depends on the quality of the social connections they nurture. The quality of the workplace connections can be defined as life giving (high quality) or life depleting (low quality). Positive social interactions facilitate organizational learning, cooperation, effectiveness, and employee loyalty, among many other desirable outcomes. High-quality connections are brief, mutually beneficial, and dynamic dyadic interaction, which have the power to energize people with vital resources to do their work well. Positive psychology and positive organizational scholarship –the science of how people and organizations flourish- provide us with tools that can help bring about high-quality connections. This paper defines positive relationships at work, with a particular focus on high-quality connections, examines the benefits of high-quality relationships and connections, and provides a framework for building high-quality connections. The paper shows that high-quality connections are a pathway to building individual and organizational flourishing

The use of mindfulness in dealing with ambiguity during transformational organizational change

The present mixed-methods study examined how 19 experienced change leaders cope with ambiguity during transformational organizational change and whether mindfulness helps them do that. Study findings indicated that practitioners react in varying ways to ambiguity and employees generally react negatively. Change leaders rely on personal coping and project initiation strategies, ongoing guidance and support, agile and action-oriented approaches, courageous and bold leadership, and trust in their process to manage ambiguity for themselves. To help others deal with ambiguity, change leaders repeatedly articulate the change vision and direction and demonstrate confident, strong change leadership. Mindfulness appears to enhance leaders’ abilities to interact with others, maintain perspective, and attune with others’ emotional states. Mindful change leaders appear to more frequently practice self-awareness and self-care, seek professional advice and assistance, and exercise an agile, action-oriented approach to leading change as ambiguity coping mechanisms

Contagion Design: Labour, Economy, Habits, Data

How is contagion designed? How do labour, migration, habits and data configure contagion? Analyzing the current conjuncture through these vectors, this book critically addresses issues of rising unemployment, restricted movement, increasing governance of populations through data systems and the compulsory redesign of habits. Design logics underscore both biological contagion and political technologies. Contagion is redesigning how labour and migration are differentially governed, experienced and indeed produced. Habits generate modes of exposure and protection from contagion and become a resource for managing biological and social life. Data turns contagion into models that make a virus actionable and calculable. New modes of sociality and collaboration provoke forms of contagious mutuality. But can the logic of pre-emption and prediction ever accommodate and control the contingencies of a virus? Taken as a whole, the essays in this small book explore these issues and their implications for cultural, social and political research of biotechnical conditions. If contagion never abandons the scene of the present, if it persists as a constitutive force in the production of social life, how might we redesign the viral as the friend we love to hate