Positive Organizational Scholarship: Meet the Movement

Abstract

As a University of Michigan MBA graduate with a two-month respite before I began my job at McKinsey, I was looking for short-term, interesting work. I became an assistant to a group of faculty members at the Michigan Business School and the Department of Psychology who were on fire about their work. They had held a research conference in December 2001 and produced an edited book titled Positive Organizational Scholarship (Berrett-Koehler Publishers). Multiple symposia had been created and presented at the Academy of Management focusing on themes such as energy, positive emotion, resilience, and virtues. In addition a website had been created to facilitate networking among researchers interested in this domain (See http://www.bus.umich.edu/FacultyResearch/Research/Scholarship/). This group of faculty had planned another day-long event for Business School alumni, all based on this new perspective they labeled