Positivity and Organizational Success

Kim Cameron: Positive Organizational Scholarship started as we began noticing unusual patterns or trends in organizations that should have deteriorated in their performance as a result of downsizing. One of the chief findings, from about a dozen years of research on downsizing, is that downsizing causes performance to deteriorate in about 80% of the companies. That is, productivity diminishes, morale diminishes, profitability diminishes, productivity, innovation, all of those things diminish, but that leaves about 20% of the companies that flourish after downsizing. In investigating that 20%, we began identifying very unusual attributes or behaviors or patterns of response to the crisis that they faced and from that investigation emerged a field of study we refer to now as Positive Organizational Scholarship. Positive refers to just an affirmative bias, unusually flourishing behavior. Organizational refers to the organization dynamics; this is not the psyche of individuals, it's not personal attributes, it's the organization's performance itself. And then scholarship means that we are attempting to take a rigorous empirical approach to studying these phenomena, rather than just storytelling or identifying luminary leaders and trying to copy their patterns of behavior. So, this Positive Organizational Scholarship approach is a study of that which is unusually positive and which leads to flourishing outcomes.

Rachel Salaman: You're the Co-Founder of the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship. What does that do?

Kim Cameron: The Center is a set of individuals, all of whom are interested in pursuing this investigation of positive dynamics. Now, the word positive is oftentimes both misunderstood and controversial. Positive, in our approach, refers to three different phenomena. One is what we refer to as positively deviant performance. Now in the English language, deviance normally has a negative connotation, but you can think of deviance, the definition of deviance rather as simply being an aberration from the norm, or unexpected behavior. We normally think of that as problematic or difficulties, but you can think of deviance in the positive sense, that is, rule breaking and unusual performance, but positively focused. One of the connotations of positive, is positive deviance, so how do organizations that do especially well achieve that level of performance? The second connotation of positive, is an affirmative bias that is a focus on strengths rather than weaknesses, on optimism rather than pessimism, on identifying abundance or opportunities as opposed to simply problem solving. So a second connotation has to do with affirmative bias in patterns in speech and communication and so on. A third connotation of positive has to do with what we refer to as virtuousness, or, in other words, the best of the human condition. In the original Greek, the word virtuous means the best that human beings aspire to achieve. When you are at your best, you are in a virtuous condition, so a virtuoso in music, is the best performer. Well, we're also trying to study that which individuals consider to be inherently good, valuable, extraordinary, desirable and how you achieve that in organizations. So those three connotations separate this Positive Organizational Scholarship field from normal organizational scholarship, which focuses much more on problem solving, on overcoming difficulties, on creating competitive strategies to beat the competition, on warding off international encroachment and so on. Primarily, one would refer to those as problematic, deficit-based approaches.

Rachel Salaman: So how widespread are these ideas?

Kim Cameron: We are attempting to spread this Positive Organizational Scholarship field globally, and making some progress. I just returned, a couple of weeks ago, from a conference in Spain in which this was a primary focus of the conference. There are individual conferences at universities in several institutions around the world, primarily now in Asia, in Western Europe, Scandinavia and in South America, in addition to the United States. So, for example, we have a website, onto which people can simply add their names as being interested scholars in this arena, and there are probably about 1,000 people worldwide now who are actively involved in some aspect of Positive Organizational Scholarship. Although it started at the University of Michigan, and for five years or so has been primarily funded by and sponsored by this small group of individuals, we're hoping it does not remain that way, but rather, becomes part of the vernacular, scholarly vernacular throughout the world.

Rachel Salaman: The idea that a negative attitude holds back innovation and best performance, and a positive attitude is encouraging of those things, is hardly new though, is it? How does Positive Organizational Scholarship take this further?

Kim Cameron: It's not new at all that a positive focus is related to higher morale, higher productivity, better performance, but there's an interesting phenomena, Rachel, that we all are aware of, and that is that negative news, a negative bias characterizes most human beings. For example, if when you walked into the office today, you met the first person and he or she said, "Rachel, you look wonderful today." Second person, "Rachel, you look wonderful today." Third person, "Rachel, you look terrible, are you feeling okay?" Fourth person, "Rachel, you look wonderful today." Fifth person, "Rachel, you look wonderful today." The question is which piece of feedback do you pay most attention to? Likely answer, the negative feedback, so losing £100 or $100 creates more reaction than winning £100 or $100. One traumatic event in childhood has much more impact generally than one positive event in childhood. So over time, individuals begin reacting, learn to react more strongly to the negative than the positive and so, from the time we're very small, we began developing a bias toward paying attention to negative. That is, we are more attuned to negative feedback now when we're adults and we're more attuned to giving negative feedback. And so, organizations, as you might expect, are therefore organized to pay attention to the negative much more than the positive. It's not that we have lost the fact that positive feels good and is – and we have an inclination toward the positive as well, but we've learned over time, it's a learned bias toward the negative. So these are not new ideas. Focusing on the positive is not a new idea at all, of course. It's just that very little empirical research has verified its impact, very little attention currently is spent on how you foster, facilitate it and its impact on organizations and on individuals within organizations. The counter to this learned focus on the negative is something else that's referred to as a heliotropic effect. Now that's a terribly jargon-laden word, but heliotropic effect means that individuals, in fact, all living systems, everything alive, has a inborn natural inclination toward the light and away from dark, or toward positive energy and away from negative energy, or, most accurately stated, toward that which is life-giving and away from that which is life-depleting. Now that makes sense because even you think of human beings or any living system in evolutionary terms, in order to survive, any species is attracted to that which perpetuates life, and is repelled by that which diminishes life; that's called the heliotropic effect. So if you can unleash the heliotropic effect, if you can help people identify and capitalize on the heliotropic effect, you get flourishing growth improvement, but again, we have learned that to ignore negative feedback is often dangerous, so we have learned our way away from the heliotropic effect. Most organizations are designed to ignore the positive and pay attention only to the negative.

Rachel Salaman: Is it a case of getting the balance right, or is it a case of always being relentlessly positive?

Kim Cameron: It certainly is balance, of course. In fact, one of the criticisms of Positive Organizational Scholarship is that it is Pollyanna-ish in its approach, saccharin sweet, syrupy and substance-less. On the other hand, I would argue that that's not the case at all. We have found, in research in fact, that a ratio of approximately five positive comments, five positive emotions, five positive actions for every negative action, reduces flourishing. Let me give you an example. One study, which was done here in Michigan, was an investigation of 60 top management teams in which they were all, one at a time, working in a room for one full day. They were being observed by graduate students, coding the communication in their work. One of the categories into which communication was coded was the number of positive statements made, relative to the number of negative statements made. Now, what's a positive statement? A positive statement is approval, congratulatory, helpful, caring, supportive. A negative statement is disparaging, critical, contradictory, undercutting. Unbeknown to these people, we categorized their organizations as high performing, medium performing or low performing based on three criteria. One was the amount of profitability, the amount of money they made. Second is their customer ratings, customer loyalty, and the third was, we had, what's called, 360 feedback on each one of the individuals; that is their colleagues rated how effective they were as leaders. If they scored above average on all of those three indicators, they were labeled a high performing company. If they scored below average, they were rated as a below performing company. Here's what we discovered. We discovered that high performing companies had an average of five positive statements for every negative statement as they did the work, as they simply interacted during the day. Low performing companies had an average of three negative statements for every positive statement. Now that ratio has been argued to be almost universal. It's the same ratio that predicts, for example, happy marriages and intact happy, flourishing families over time. One study has been done following families and relationships, married couples over a ten year period of time, and based on the interaction literally only for 15 minutes, you can tape record an interaction for 15 minutes, ten years later, in one particular study, you can predict which marriages are happy and which marriages are flourishing, with a 95% accuracy, based on the 15 minute conversation a decade before, and the predictive ratio was five positive statements for every negative statement.

Back to the original question; what we're finding is that there certainly has to be a balance, but because people react more strongly to the negative, the negative has to be couched in a positive environment. So that's why five positive statements are needed in order to have the one negative statement have the most impact and power, and have people respond appropriately to it. So a balance, yes, but in favor of the positive.

Rachel Salaman: Are you saying that negative messages, like if you have to fire someone or explain poor results, should be couched in positive terms?

Kim Cameron: One of the findings, from my own research on downsizing, was that most organizations deteriorated in performance after downsizing because they approached the downsizing in a negative way. They simply fired people. They just – they had across the board layoffs. They escorted people out of the building, not allowing them to get back to their computers in case they would do some subversive activity. They treated them as human costs or human liabilities, rather than as human resources, something to be invested in. The organizations that downsized most effectively, meaning they tended to flourish after downsizing, were those that couched this as an opportunity for growth and development. They invested in individuals who they had to – whose jobs they had to eliminate. They provided training and development opportunities; they provided opportunities for employment elsewhere or education elsewhere. That is, they invested in human beings as resources. So even in difficult circumstances, even when the budget's deteriorating, when competition is battering us, when things are tight, when crisis seems to be on the horizon, those are especially conditions in which a positive climate, a positive environment, positive communications, positive relationships need to be demonstrated. The fundamental values of an organization are almost always tested best in crisis. So we say people are our most valuable asset, that's pretty common in most companies, but when the crisis arises, whether or not that's really the case, is often put to a test, and so we've noticed that organizations that flourish simply have a bias toward the positive.

Rachel Salaman: If we can talk now about your book, Positive Leadership: Strategies for Extraordinary Performance, where you go into all these ideas in more detail, you identify four interrelated leadership strategies, starting with positive climate. Is this the environment that you were talking about before? Why is this important?

Kim Cameron: It is. The environment of an organization is often described as a climate. Climate, like the weather, can change – not instantaneously, but certainly can change in the short run. As a result of that, managers, good leaders, pay attention to climate. Now, how do you define climate? Climate normally is simply the emotional state, or the emotional condition, of employees in an organization. If they are happy, optimistic, flourishing in their attitudes and their feelings, we call that a positive climate. When they're discouraged, unengaged, pessimistic, we would call that a negative climate. There's pretty substantial evidence that suggests that positive climates and productivity, success, employee retention, customer loyalty are all positively related. So in this book, we simply identify three or four relatively unusual strategies for trying to effect positive climate. There are lots of prescriptions: teamwork and reward systems and paying attention to people and so on, but the book Positive Leadership is attempting to simply supplement what's normal in the literature with some things that people may not be paying nearly as much attention to, but could.

Rachel Salaman: Like what?

Kim Cameron: Well, for example, we talk about the importance of institutionalizing compassion, institutionalizing forgiveness, institutionalizing gratitude. Now, those are, sort of, fuzzy words and don't have a very precise meaning, but, for example, we've begun doing research identifying, measuring, as precisely as we can, those kinds of concepts, and what we've discovered, for example, is that when organizations foster a sense of forgiveness, I'm going to use that just as an example, almost always in organizations, individuals are harmed or offended or in some ways have some discouraging events occur. Many organizations have a climate in which grudge holding, blaming, some kind of retribution is common. If something goes wrong, somebody has to pay, somebody has to be sued, somebody has to take responsibility. In organizations, on the other hand, that tend to flourish, they have institutionalized what we refer to as forgiveness. Forgiveness simply means not grudge- holding, but moving forward to an optimistic future. It doesn't mean forgetting; it doesn't mean minimizing; it doesn't mean just ignoring the fact that there's been harm, but it really does mean putting aside the offense, identifying an area in which we can focus toward improvement and moving forward. That was an especially important predictor of flourishing after downsizing, because downsizing is almost always a harmful strategy in organizations; somebody is going to be offended; somebody is going to be damaged, and so institutionalizing forgiveness was a predictor of organizations flourishing as a result of downsizing. Gratitude is very much the same – we've discovered marked changes in individuals' in organizations behavior by simply institutionalizing gratitude. For example, keeping gratitude journals, making gratitude visits, distributing gratitude cards to employees or a certain number of employees. I'll give you a quick example of a study. This happens to be done with MBA students in a college, but some of the students, half the students in the class, were assigned to keep a gratitude journal, meaning write down three things everyday for which you're grateful. The other half of the class was asked to keep a journal, but to write down three things that were frustrating, or for which they were not grateful, or, in another condition, another study, simply write down three neutral things. So we have a contrast. We had part of the people keeping track of gratitude events, some keeping track of either neutral or frustrating events. At the end of the semester, the following differences were noted. The people who were put in a gratitude condition once a day had higher grade point averages, fewer physical symptoms, less tardiness, less absenteeism, better relationships with roommates and friends, a more optimistic picture of the future, that is what they expect that would occur in the future, than the others. Translate that now into an organization. Organizations that institutionalize gratitude simply have people who are more energized, more positive and more productive at work. Those are just examples of ways in which we attempt to affect climate in ways that leaders often don't think are important.

Rachel Salaman: You talk about institutionalizing these things, how do you actually do that? Is that about announcing new policies?

Kim Cameron: Well, it certainly can be policies, that is, there can be a policy saying, "Okay, we're going to keep track of gratitude events and we'll begin every meeting with a recording of those," or in our reports "We're now going to identify what went especially well as well as what targets we missed, what quality records we may – that we succeeded at as opposed to the ones that we didn't." So policy is certainly part of it. Part of it also, however, is simply the behavior of the leader. It's very clear that the conversation, the example, the leadership of a single person at the top has an extraordinary amount of impact on the organization. So, individuals themselves, especially leaders, can have a remarkable impact on the individuals for whom they're responsible. That is, they can simply demonstrate those attributes. The best leaders I know are people who frequently express gratitude, don't hold grudges, but are forgiving. It doesn't mean they're soft; it doesn't mean their standards aren't firm; it doesn't mean they're mediocre; it means they expect excellence, but are tolerant of mistakes and that they are compassionate, meaning that when there's suffering, or pain, or difficulty, they respond in ways that help support and strengthen other people who are experiencing a difficulty. So part of it is maybe policy, part of it is simply personal example.

Rachel Salaman: A lot of this seems like common sense, that people are happier and more productive in a positive environment with positive leaders, why do you think people don't figure this out for themselves?

Kim Cameron: I think that people don't figure this out themselves because they've learned over time to pay attention to negative feedback. When I encounter an individual in my class, for example, let's say I have a class of 50 students, and I have one or two of them who give me feedback that things aren't going well. They don't like the class. The material is too simple or too complex, or not on target. The power of those one or two voices is extraordinarily strong and so I tend to pay attention to those things. There's a colleague who wrote an article, published in a scientific journal, in which he surveyed about 1,000 studies in psychology and the conclusion of the article was captured by the article's title. The title was Bad is Stronger than Good and so he made the case that people have a tendency, have learned to have a tendency toward the negative. Now, that does not mean that human beings are not heliotropic, or, in other words, have a built-in tendency toward positive energy and toward that which is life giving, but we've learned to be protective; the fight/flight syndrome. As a result of that, most of our organizations know to do one thing, but do another. We know to be positive. We know that we like it better. We are attracted to people who make us feel better, to positive people. We are repelled by people who discourage us, diminish us, criticize us. In fact, psychologically, if we encounter so much stress and so much negative feedback, we actually have automatic mechanisms that kick in; repression, regression, transference, those kinds of things that protect us against too much negative. So there really is a protective mechanism that tries to keep us flourishing, almost impossible to have too much positive, but it certainly is possible to have too much negative. So although it's common sense, absolutely common sense and, in fact, Positive Organizational Scholarship is by no means a new phenomena, it is simply a reminder of that which makes us human, and we're trying to identify and have identified the impact of those factors on organizations.

Rachel Salaman: So, if someone wanted to start turning their organization into a more positive place tomorrow, what tips would you give them? Where should they start?

Kim Cameron: If I was a leader and wanted to help my organization become more positive, I would probably start with two or three levers or strategies. One is we have found that positive energizers, that is, individuals who help other people flourish, who provide uplift to the colleagues with whom they work, as opposed to negative energizers who diminish, suck all the positive energy out of individuals. Most of us know positive energizers and negative energizers. Well, positive energizers, as it turns out in research, are four times more important in predicting performance than people who are the center of an information network or an influence network or who are at the top of a hierarchy. Positive energy matters a lot. It's possible to diagnose that simply by asking people in the organization, "Who are the people in this organization who are the most positive energizing people with whom we work?" Identifying those people and helping them influence the rest of the organization is a very simple, but very powerful lever. Another lever that I would suggest has to do with giving people what we sometimes refer to as "best self" feedback. That is in performance appraisals, instead of simply concentrating on what has gone wrong or in what areas people need to develop, or when we interpret 360 feedback saying, "What are the areas where you need to work on?", "best self" feedback identifies those areas where people are most strong, provide most value and contribute in the most unique ways. That feedback can be obtained by asking people, for example, we have a little strategy where we ask people to identify 20 other individuals who know them well, co-workers, friends, family members, neighbors and so on, asking them to respond to the following question, "When you have seen me make a valuable contribution, or when you have seen me at my best, or when I have done something that really assisted and helped others, what has happened?" You then get back three stories from each of these 20 people. Those identify certainly unique characteristics or strengths that often people don't identify for themselves because they're so natural and so easily done. We take people through a process that simply helps them create a "best self" portrait, "What am I doing that's adding the most value? In what areas am I most strong? How can I capitalize on those?" That's the second lever of simply giving people a chance to do what they do best everyday and sometimes, they don't even know what that is without feedback. And then I think a third we've mentioned before, an abundance of positive communication, five to one ratios have been shown to be especially powerful in helping productivity and profitability and positive outcomes occur.

Rachel Salaman: Kim Cameron, thank you very much for joining me.

Kim Cameron: Thank you, Rachel.

Rachel Salaman: If you'd like to find out more about Positive Organizational Scholarship, go to www.bus.umich.edu/positive. I'll be back next month with another Expert Interview, so do join me then. Goodbye.