Jane E. Dutton

University of Michigan | U-M · Department of Management & Organizations

We developed an integrative logic for why respectful engagement with supervisors would encourage and enable help-seeking from coworkers, resulting in greater levels of task performance. Using time-lagged data, the results of a moderated-mediated model supported our theorizing that respectful engagement between employees and their supervisors is key...

In four studies we examine whether and why respectfully engaging with other organizational members can augment creativity for individuals and teams. We develop and test a model in which respectful engagement among organizational members facilitates relational information processing, which in turn results in enhanced creative behaviors. We found a s...

This symposium focuses on the tough choices actors need to make or challenges actors need to overcome while trying to respond compassionately towards sufferers in organizations and communities. This symposium builds on the momentum surrounding interest in the research and practice of compassion at work, striving to both complicate and enrich curren...

While help-seeking behaviors in the workplace are beneficial to individuals, groups and organizations as a whole, theoretical and empirical evidence concerning when and how help-seeking behaviors are likely to emerge remain limited. This study presents an interactional view of help-seeking behaviors that highlights how respectful modes of interrela...

Identity work is relevant to a variety of adaptive challenges that individuals face at work. While such challenges are wide ranging, most empirical research to date has focused on identity work in response to a somewhat narrow range of challenges. In this symposium, we seek to enrich the conversation on identity processes and outcomes for individua...

Compassion is an interpersonal process involving the noticing, feel- ing, sensemaking, and acting that alleviates the suffering of another person. This process has recently received substantial attention by or- ganizational researchers and practitioners alike. This article reviews what researchers currently know about compassion as it unfolds in dy...

Using a mixed methods design, we examine the role of self-evaluations in influencing support for environmental issues. In Study 1—an inductive, qualitative study—we develop theory about how environmental issue supporters evaluate themselves in a mixed fashion, positively around having assets (self-assets) and negatively around questioning their per...

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...

The design of a job is deeply consequential for employees’ psychological experiences at work. Jobs are collections of tasks and relationships that are grouped together and assigned to an individual (Ilgen & Hollenbeck, 1992), and scholars have long been interested in the way these elements come together to constitute the experience of a job (Griffi...

In this article we introduce AMR's Special Topic Forum on Understanding and Creating Caring and Compassionate Organizations. We outline why the time is right for such a forum, uncover scholarly and philosophical roots of a focus on compassion and care, and provide a brief introduction to the diverse and rich set of articles contained in this forum....

Research shows that reflecting on benefits received can make people happier, but it is unclear whether or not such reflection makes them more helpful. Receiving benefits can promote prosocial behavior through reciprocity and positive affect, but these effects are often relationship-specific, short-lived, and complicated by ambivalent reactions. We...

The chapters in this book have introduced a wealth of insights and developments born of the new and emerging discipline called Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS). Collectively the chapters chart exciting and relatively unmapped territory in the study of behavior, processes, structures, and dynamics in organizations. The objective of this fin...

We elaborate a theory of the foundations of a collective capability for compassion through a detailed analysis of everyday practices in an organizational unit. Our induced theory of compassion capability draws on the findings of an interview study to illustrate and explain how a specific set of everyday practices creates two relational conditions —...

High-quality connections (HQCs) are short-term, dyadic interactions that are positive in terms of the subjective experience of the connected individuals and the structural features of the connection. Although previous research has shown that HQCs are associated with individual and organizational outcomes, we advance theory by identifying cognitive,...

In this chapter, we examine work by those who have responded to Frost's (1999) call for research that accounts for suffering and compassion in work organizations. We add to this line of inquiry by reviewing the organizational research on compassion published over the past decade and illuminating connections with extant research on related phenomena...

What makes qualitative research really worth doing? When do people feel most alive and energized in their research? Research Alive offers insight into the doing of qualitative research by focusing on stories of moments that are experienced as generative. The book offers a unique array of 40 stories from both new and established scholars. The stori...

Research can provide heartwarming experiences which uplift researchers and participants, providing occasions for personal growth and change . Our article makes this case and illustrates heartwarming research experiences using examples from our own research.

In this paper we organize research on work-related identities into a four-perspective typology that captures different ways identities can be "positive." Each perspective on positive identity - virtue, evaluative, developmental, and structural - highlights a different source of positivity and opens new avenues for theorizing about identity construc...

We utilize a qualitative study of 33 employees in for-profit and non-profit organizations to elaborate theory on job crafting. We specifically focus on how employees at different ranks describe perceiving and adapting to challenges in the execution of job crafting. Elaborating the challenges employees perceive in job crafting and their responses to...

Organizational learning is an important means for improving performance. Learning is a process, that is, often relational in the sense of relying on interactions between people to determine what needs improving and how to do it. This study addresses the question of how the quality of work relationships facilitates learning behaviours in organizatio...

Researchers have assumed that employee support programs cultivate affective organizational commitment by enabling employees to receive support. Using multimethod data from a Fortune 500 retail company, we propose that these programs also strengthen commitment by enabling employees to give support. We find that giving strengthens affective organizat...

Reply by the current author to the comments made by Ben Hardy (see record 2008-15083-014) on the original article (see record 2008-00018-008). We welcome the dialogue generated by Ben Hardy. We are especially excited by his call and recommendations for future research, since we share with him the excitement offered by this theoretical and researc...

This chapter analyzes how members make sense of organizational actions after a crisis. All individuals have developed “virtue frames,” or categories of interpretation that determine the extent to which actions are judged to be morally good and right. This chapter examines the effects of these virtue frames on members’ identification with and attach...

This paper describes two studies that explore core questions about compassion at work. Findings from a pilot survey indicate that compassion occurs with relative frequency among a wide variety of individuals, suggesting a relationship between experienced compassion, positive emotion, and affective commitment. A complementary narrative study reveals...

Human physiological systems are highly responsive to positive social interactions, but the organizational importance of this finding has been largely unexplored. After reviewing the extant research, we illustrate how consideration of the physiological effects of positive social interactions at work opens new research questions about (a) how positiv...

Job crafting captures the active changes employees make to their own job designs in ways that can bring about numerous positive outcomes, including engagement, job satisfaction, resilience, and thriving. This briefing introduces the core ideas of job crafting theory for management students by defining it, describing why it is important, summarizing...

Human physiological systems are highly responsive to positive social interactions, but the organizational importance of this finding largely has been unexplored. After reviewing extant research, we illustrate how consideration of the physiology of positive social interactions at work opens new research questions about how positive social interactio...

In this article we develop a theory to explain how individual compassion becomes socially organized and how the organizing process gains collective competence in its ability to alleviate suffering. The theory is built from an in-depth case study of one organization???s response to members who lost their belongings in a fire. The compassion organizi...

We review how positive social interactions at work affect the physiological functioning of employees' cardiovascular, immune and neuroendocrine systems. We illustrate how consideration of the physiological effects of positive connections and relationships invites new research questions for leader-member exchange, mentoring, and interpersonal helpin...

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/35591/2/b169828x.0001.001.pdf http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/35591/1/b169828x.0001.001.txt

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/35590/2/b2036071.0001.001.pdf http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/35590/1/b2036071.0001.001.txt

We develop a theory to explain how individual compassion in response to human pain in organizations becomes socially coordinated through a process we call compassion organizing. The theory specifies five mechanisms, including contextual enabling of attention, emotion, and trust, agents improvising structures, and symbolic enrichment, that show how...

Some research projects draw you in. They touch you on multiple levels, expanding, stretching, and teaching you. Our research project on the Port Au-thority (PA) of New York and New Jersey and its struggle with the homelessness issue did all of that to us as researchers. In the resulting research paper (Dutton & Dukerich, 1991), we argued that the P...

This paper analyzes members' sensemaking of organizational actions using virtue frames and its effects on members' relationships with the organization in the context of the events of September 11th. We explore the use of three virtue frames to make sense of a university's response to the events of 9–11-01. We examine the effects of interpreted virt...

Seeing organizations differently: Three lenses on compassion One of the unspoken realities of life in organizations is that people suffer. Someone who has just been told that she has breast cancer confronts a jolt to her confidence and her sense of mortality that play out at work as well as in other spheres of her life. Someone who is dealing with...

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...

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...

Coordination is the process people use to create, adapt, and re-create organizations. We propose a theory of coordination as energy-in-conversation to help organizational scholars comprehend the emotional and motivational dynamics of coordination. Our model describes how people generate and diminish their energy in their attempts to coordinate, how...

In this article, the authors explore compassion in work organizations. They discuss the prevalence and costs of pain in organizational life, and identify compassion as an important process that can occur in response to suffering. At the individual level, compassion takes place through three subprocesses: noticing another’s pain, experiencing an emo...

In this paper, we present a model of interpersonal sensemaking and describe how this process contributes to the meaning that employees make of their work. The cues employees receive from others in the course of their jobs speak directly to the value ascribed by others to the job, role, and employee. We assert that these cues are crucial inputs in a...

As the title suggestions, this article asks two basic questions of organizational scholars: How do we come alive in how we do our research? What do we look for in organizational contexts to see life? Drawing on personal experience and an extraordinary example of a life-filled unit in a billing department of a community hospital, this essay engages...

This paper analyzes the contextual cues female managers attend to when considering raising gender-equity issues at work. Study 1 provides a qualitative look at the range of cues indicating context favorability, including demographic patterns, top management qualities, and cultural exclusivity. Study 2 experimentally manipulates these cues and revea...

An employee is diagnosed with cancer or loses a family member unexpectedly. An earthquake destroys an entire section of a city, leaving hundreds dead, injured, or homeless. At time like these, managerial handbooks fail us. After all, leaders can't eliminate personal suffering, nor can they ask employees who are dealing with these crises to check th...

In this study, we examined 82 accounts of "issue selling" to better understand managers' implicit theories for successfully shaping change from below by directing the attention of top management. The study reveals the importance of various issue-selling moves, including packaging, involvement, and timing. Managerial accounts uncover three kinds of...

We propose that employees craft their jobs by changing cognitive, task, and/or relational boundaries to shape interactions and relationships with others at work. These altered task and relational configurations change the design and social environment of the job, which, in turn, alters work meanings and work identity. We offer a model of job crafti...

In-depth interviews with business school faculty members suggest that work relationships are more than strategically chosen means to career mobility. Relationships are career-defining ends as well, and negative relationships may be as consequential as helpful ties. Findings also showed significant gender differences: women, more than men, told stor...

Building from an in-depth study of a library system's responses to two different issues, we propose a theoretical account of the conditions that are conducive to issue ownership. At center stage in this account are the roles of emotions and social identities in determining whether and how an issue is seem as "belonging to" organizational members. W...

Under what conditions will women raise and promote gender-equity issues in their work organizations? We used structural equation modeling to analyze responses from a sample of over a thousand female managers to address this question. The results suggest that the perceived favorability of the organizational context fosters a willingness to sell gend...

Issue selling is an important mechanism for creating change initiatives in organizations. This paper presents two studies that examine what middle managers think about as they decide whether or not to sell strategic issues to top management. In Study 1 middle managers identify themes that indicate a favorable or unfavorable context for issue sellin...

We conducted an inductive study of the everyday decisions about dress at work of female administrative employees in a university business school. Our findings reveal that dress is an attribute embedded in a variety of cognitive schemata that govern individuals' comprehension of and behavior at work. In acquiring and executing these schemata, employ...

This paper explores the relationship between organizational context and the interpretation of strategic issues by examining the hypothesis that CEOs' interpretations of foreign investment in the USA are influenced by the organizational context in which they are embedded. Three aspects of organizational context - the global business experience of th...

Prior research on the impact of ethics education within the business curriculum has yielded mixed results. Although the impact is often found to be positive, it appears to be both small and short-lived. Interpretation of these results, however, is subject to important methodological limitations. The present research employed a longitudinal methodol...

We develop a model to explain how images of one's work organization shape the strength of his or her identification with the organization. We focus on two key organizational images: one based on what a member believes is distinctive, central, and enduring about his or her organization and one based on a member's beliefs about what outsiders think a...

The time and attention of top management in an organization are critical, but limited, resources. This article develops insights on issue selling as a process that is central to explaining how and where top management allocates its time and attention. We see issue selling as a critical activity in the early stages of organizational decision-making...

The time and attention of top management in an organization are critical, but limited, resources. This article develops insights on issue selling as a process that is central to explaining how and where top management allocates its time and attention. We see issue selling as a critical activity in the early stages of organizational decision-making...

Models of strategic decision-making and environmental scanning typically assume that decision-makers diagnose issues actively, using conscious and intentional effort to identify and to interpret potentially significant events, developments and trends. This article establishes that conditions in organizations put decision-makers ‘on automatic’in the...

M.B.A. programs in the United States continue to admit foreign students in record numbers, yet we know little about how this cultural diversity may impact the values and ethical decision making behavior of either American or foreign students. The research discussed here examined this issue within the context of a large M.B.A. program where non-U S....