Gretchen M. Spreitzer

University of Michigan | U-M

Thriving, the psychological experience of both vitality (or energy) and learning, is often elusive. Rather than growing, developing, and feeling energized, workers report stagnation and depletion. While much of the research on thriving at work has focused on what managers can do to promote thriving amongst workers, we highlight the means by which p...

Background and objectives: The researchers examine the relationship between two variables related to work meaningfulness and engagement - psychological empowerment and job crafting - among Ontario registered nurses working in public health. Research design and methods: This quantitative, cross-sectional study was conducted in Ontario, Canada wit...

Background and objectives Job crafting is proactively adjusting and redesigning one's own job to make it more meaningful. This is accomplished by changing the activities (task crafting), altering the way one thinks about the job (cognitive crafting), and using discretion about with whom one chooses to work (relational crafting). We examined self-re...

In this paper, we establish the relationship between de-energizing relationships and individual performance in organizations. To date, the emphasis in social network research has largely been on positive dimensions of relationships despite literature from social psychology revealing the prevalence and detrimental impact of de-energizing relationshi...

This paper is about extraordinary performance in organizations. Our specific focus is unusual. We examine a context with which many readers are deeply familiar, the public school classroom. We consider the work of highly effective teachers and generate a framework of hypotheses about how they get extraordinary results. These hypotheses may contrast...

Current organizational theory and research affirm the beneficial effects of experiencing positive affect at work. In recent years, researchers have begun to question the popular notion that the more positive affect at work, the better—that more positive affect is desirable for work-related outcomes. In this article, we propose a rationale for why m...

Recent corporate scandals have highlighted the dangers associated with the short-term, earnings-driven mentality that so often abounds in today�s organizations. In order to re-build the reputation of firms and markets, businesses are seeking to organize in ways that are economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable. However, a survey of...

Purpose of the Study: We examined how organizational culture in nursing homes affects staff turnover, because culture is a first step to creating satisfactory work environments. Nursing home administrators were asked in 2009 to report on facility culture and staff turnover. We received responses from 419 of 1,056 administrators contacted. Responden...

Virtuousness in organizations involves individuals and teams being resilient, or bouncing back from setbacks in ways that allow them to adapt and grow. In two studies, we focus on emotional carrying capacity (ECC), wherein relationship partners express more of their emotions, express both positive and negative emotions, and do so constructively, as...

We develop theory about how growing at work is an interpretive accomplishment in which individuals sense that they are making progressive self-change. Through a study of how employees interpret themselves as growing at three organizations, we develop a theoretical account of how employees draw from contextual and personal resources to interpret the...

Positive organizational scholarship (POS) is an umbrella concept used to emphasize what elevates and what is inspiring to individuals and organizations by defining the possibilities for positive deviance rather than just improving on the challenging, broken, and needlessly difficult. Just as positive psychology explores optimal individual psycholog...

Background: Culture change initiatives propose to improve care by addressing the lack of managerial supports and prevalent stressful work environments in the industry; however, little is known about how culture change facilities differ from facilities in the industry that have not chosen to affiliate with the resident-centered care movements. Pur...

This article makes the critical role that the construct of energy plays in motivation research and reviews six literatures related to human energy in a work context: (1) conservation of resources, (2) attention restoration theory, (3) ego-depletion theory, (4) energetic activation, (5) interaction ritual chain, and (6) self-determination theory. We...

This article introduces a tool to help students learn to better manage their energy. The tool asks students to assess their energy levels for each waking hour over at least 2 days in order to identify patterns of activities associated with high energy and with depleted energy. The article describes how to use the tool in the classroom by articulati...

Thriving is defined as the psychological state in which individuals experience both a sense of vitality and learning. We developed and validated a measure of the construct of thriving at work. Additionally, we theoretically refined the construct by linking it to key outcomes, such as job performance, and by examining its contextual embeddedness. In...

What makes for sustainable individual and organizational performance? Employees who are thriving-not just satisfied and productive but also engaged in creating the future. The authors found that people who fit this description demonstrated 16% better overall performance, 125% less burnout, 32% more commitment to the organization, and 46% more job s...

Energy is often viewed as the basic fuel for individual action and cognition, yet what exactly is energy? How can it be defined? How should it be measured? And, most importantly, why should organizational scholars, especially positive organization scholarship (POS) scholars, care about it? This chapter reviews the burgeoning interdisciplinary liter...

The Oxford Handbook of Positive Organizational Scholarship synthesizes much of the knowledge that has been generated after approximately ten years of research in the area of study called Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS). The Handbook identifies what is known, what is not known, and what is in need of further investigation going forward. Th...

In this concluding chapter, we survey this handbook's abundant content to synthesize the many findings and highlight what has been learned from positive organizational scholarship research since its infancy. These findings are grouped into six key categories: complicating the meaning of positive; specifying mechanisms undergirding generative dynami...

Job crafting, which occurs when individuals proactively make changes to their jobs, can be a useful tool for academics seeking more meaningful careers. We suggest changes to the cognitive, task, and relational aspects of academic jobs that can infuse scholarly work with more personal meaning. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Recently, Pfeffer (2010) called for a better understanding of the human dimension of sustainability. Responding to this call, we explore how individuals sustain an important human resource-their own energy-at work. Specifically, we focus on strategies that employees use at work to sustain their energy. Our findings show that the most commonly used...

This study provides a preliminary examination of the efficacy of the Reflected Best Self Exercise. We conducted a field quasi-experiment with 108 adolescent leaders assigned to a 2 × 2 design: (1) valence of feedback (i.e., strengths-only versus strengths and improvement-oriented) and (2) source of feedback (i.e., professional (e.g., teachers, coac...

This study examines how trust, connectivity and thriving drive employees' innovative behaviors in the workplace. Using a sample of one hundred and seventy two employees across a variety of jobs and industries, we investigated the relationship between trust, connectivity (both measured at Time 1), thriving and innovative work behaviors (both measure...

In their 1998 Sloan Management Review article "Preserving Employee Morale During Downsizing," the authors maintained that strong organizations need to develop resilience so they could take advantage of new opportunities that arise during periods of economic retrenchment. They detailed four stages of downsizing programs: deciding to downsize, planni...

This paper provides an exploratory look at how the leadership practices of business organizations may foster more peaceful societies. I develop the logic for positive relationships between participative organizational leadership, employee empowerment, and peace. I offer several mechanisms to explain why these different manifestations of voice are l...

In this chapter, two academics from the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan collaborate with the President of their university to present their experiences and ideas about positive strategic leadership. Positive strategic leadership is derived from the juxtaposition of ideas from the growing stream of research on positi...

Thriving in organizations Consider these contrasting images of individuals in relation to their work. ‘Here we house the legions of the walking dead.’ When people join the legions of the walking dead, they begin to live lives of quiet desperation. They tend to experience feelings of meaninglessness, hopelessness, and impotence in their work roles....

In this article, the authors trace how meanings of the construct empowerment evolved between 1966 and 2000 across six disciplines: religion, psychology, sociology, education, social work, and management. Meanings of empowerment expanded considerably during this time period, as the construct waxed, waned, and then waxed again in popularity. Empowerm...

hriving describes an individual's experience of vitality and learning. The primary goal of this paper is to develop a model that illuminates the social embeddedness of employees' thriving at work. First, we explain why thriving is a useful theoretical construct, define thriving, and compare it to related constructs, including resilience, flourishin...

We present a theory of how individuals compose their reflected best-self portrait, which we define as a changing self-knowledge structure about who one is at one's best. We posit that people compose their reflected best-self portrait through social experiences that draw on intrapsychic and interpersonal resources. By weaving to- gether microlevel t...

This research examines how the effectiveness of transformational leadership may vary depending on the cultural values of an individual. We develop the logic for why the individual value of traditionality (emphasizing respect for hierarchy in relationships) moderates the relationship between six dimensions of transformational leadership and leadersh...

Most feedback accentuates the negative. During formal employee evaluations, discussions invariably focus on "opportunities for improvement," even if the overall evaluation is laudatory. No wonder most executives--and their direct reports--dread them. Traditional, corrective feedback has its place, of course; every organization must filter out faili...

for the development of the process model of thriving that we draw on in this paper. We also thank the other members of the Best Self Research Lab (Laura Morgan Roberts, Jane Dutton, Emily Heaphy, and Brianna Barker) for their research on the reflected best self.

Two field studies tested the hypothesis that high perceived control may serve as an antidote to the negative effects of layoffs on the employees who are not laid off (survivors). In Study 1, some participants witnessed the layoffs of fellow employees, but others did not. In Study 2, all participants survived a layoff, but they varied in the extent...

In this article, the authors develop a definition of positive deviance, a foundational construct in positive organizational scholarship. They offer a normative definition of positive deviance: intentional behaviors that depart from the norms of a referent group in honorable ways. The authors contrast this normative perspective on deviance with stat...

This paper examines the relationship between survivor reactions to a downsizing and retention subsequent to a downsizing. We hypothesize that survivors who experience the downsizing as distributively, procedurally, and interactionally just and who see top management as trustworthy will feel more attached to the organization because each reduces the...

Building commitment and preventing costly turnover of technical employees are key challenges facing organizations today. We examine whether the elements of the employment relationship that predict commitment and willingness to change companies vary significantly with age. Using a sample of over 3000 technical professionals from six large companies,...

The literature on effort-withholding behaviors (e.g., loafing, shirking, free-riding) in groups has generally focused on co-located and single-country settings. Drawing from a variety of literatures, we offer a causal model that shows why effort-withholding behaviors may be particularly at risk in transnational teams (TNTs). We theorize that three...

Transnational teams (TNTs) - teams whose members are geographically spread across at least two co-ntries - are often plag-ed with s-bstantial member differences. These incl-de the different time zones members work in, their different c-lt-ral c-stoms and norms, and the different native lang-ages they speak. The res-lting interpersonal and task -nce...

A large body of research has emerged on the effective implementation of self-managing work teams (SMWTs). However, virtually all of the research has been conducted in manufacturing settings. This article draws upon the authors’research on SMWTs in two service organizations: an insurance operation and a telecommunications company. The authors focuse...

This study examines the relationship between psychological empowerment and leadership. Empowered supervisors are hypothesized to be innovative, upward influencing, and inspirational and less focused on monitoring to maintain the status quo. Tested on a sample of mid-level supervisors from a Fortune 500 organization, the hypotheses were largely supp...

This study examines the relationship between psychological empowerment and leadership. Empowered supervisors are hypothesized to be innovative, upward influencing, and inspirational and less focused on monitoring to maintain the status quo. Tested on a sample of mid-level supervisors from a Fortune 500 organization, the hypotheses were largely supp...

Because involving lower echelon employees in decision making requires risk on the part of managers, we suggest that certain contextual features must be in place for managers to be more willing to do so. We hypothesize that managers’trust in employees, and two impersonal substitutes for trust—performance information and incentives—will increase mana...

Sumario: In this paper, the authors explore the reasons that many of the expected gains from downsizing have not been achieved. Drawing on findings from an ongoing research program on effective strategies for downsizing, they argue that maintaining the trust and empowerment of survivors is essential to minimize costs and realize the expected gains....

In this article we develop a stress-based framework of survivors' responses to downsizing. First, we synthesize prior research findings into a typology of survivor responses delineated by two underlying dimensions: constructive/destructive and active/passive. Drawing on Lazarus's theory of stress, we then posit that how survivors appraise the downs...

This paper examines the contribution of each of the four dimensions in Thomas and Velthouse's (1990) multidimensional conceptualization of psychological empowerment in predicting three expected outcomes of empowerment: effectiveness, work satisfaction, and job-related strain. The literature on the four dimensions of empowerment (i.e., meaning, comp...

This paper examines the contribution of each of the four dimensions in Thomas and Velthouse’s (1990) multidimensional conceptualization of psychological empowerment in predicting three expected outcomes of empowerment: effectiveness, work satisfaction, and job-related strain. The literature on the four dimensions of empowerment (i.e., meaning, comp...

Explores the reasons that implementation of empowerment programs for employees often proves difficult in large organizations. The authors present 7 critical questions aimed at helping executives confront the challenges of implementing employee empowerment. These questions are: (1) What do we mean when we say we want to empower people? (2) What are...

This research extends the traditional approach to the early identification of executives by introducing the notion of ability to learn from experience. Drawing on the literature, the researchers created a reliable measurement tool named Prospector for rating the potential of aspiring international executives in terms of both end-state competencies...

We provide a comprehensive review of the strategic change literature from the perspective of three theoretical lenses: the rational, learning, and cognitive lenses. We identify empirical patterns and discuss the theoretical and methodological contributions and limitations of each lens. We address the key methodological issues that hamper integratio...

The article describes a field study of a large-scale management development program designed to stimulate middle managerial change. The development of a change typology suggests that middle managers are capable of making both transformational and transactional change targeted at themselves, their work unit, and their organization. Those with low le...

This paper tests a theoretically-driven model of self-managing work team effectiveness. Self-managing work team effectiveness is defined as both high performance and employee quality of work life. Drawing on different theoretical perspectives including work design, self-leadership, sociotechnical, and participative management, four categories of va...

A set of hypotheses based on emerging theory on high-involvement systems describes expected relationships between social structural characteristics at the level of the work unit (perceptions of role ambiguity, span of control, sociopolitical support, access to information and resources, and work unit climate) and feelings of empowerment. The hypoth...

A comprehensive model of intrapersonal empowerment in the workplace posits that empowerment mediates the relationship between the social structural context and behavioral outcomes. The social structural context is operationalized as perceptions of role ambiguity, sociopolitical support, access to strategic information and resources, and work unit c...

Although myths have been comprehensively examined at a cultural or macro level in organizational studies, they have received little attention at an individual level of analysis. This article uses Campbell's "hero's journey" as an analogy for understanding managerial performance myths. The article begins with a review of the literature on individual...

The authors develop a model of NLRB decision-making that, unlike the models employed in previous studies, distinguishes between decision-making in more important, complex cases and less important, simpler cases. Using a representative sample of Board decisions over 1957-86, they find that in deciding the minority (20%) of disputes that were particu...

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Michigan, 1992. Includes bibliographical references (p. 190-208). Microfilm.

This paper provides an exploratory look at how the leadership practices of business organizations may foster more peaceful societies. I develop the logic for positive relationships between participative organizational leadership, employee empowerment, and peace. I offer several mechanisms to explain why these different manifestations of voice are l...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Michigan, 2005. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 227-245). Co-Chairs: Jane E. Dutton, Gretchen Marie Spreitzer.

Chair: Robert E. Quinn. Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Michigan, 1992. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 189-208)