Kim Cameron

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

Energy is emerging as a topic of importance to organizations, yet we have little understanding of how energy can be useful at an interpersonal level toward achieving workplace goals. We present the results of 4 studies aimed at developing, validating, and testing the relational energy construct. In Study 1, we report qualitative insights from 64 in...

This symposium will explore the research and conceptual terrain that defines exceptional positive deviance: what it means to be “extraordinary” – and how it is achieved. Specifically, we will consider how to characterize extraordinary performances and behaviors, and what factors help account for them. A substantial diversity exists in the way “extr...

Capitalism is at a crossroads and the challenges for management in the 21st century are manifold. From climate change, to increasing inequity, social exclusion, poverty and decreasing social trust in business, many agree that managers are witnessing a perfect storm. While many scholars posit that business needs to be rethought and reenacted, in thi...

While there is clear consensus across disciplines that the concept of virtue is relevant at the individual level of analysis, there are varying perspectives regarding virtue at the collective or organizational level. A basic question to be asked is whether the construct of virtue is relevant when the unit of analysis is a human group or organizatio...

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...

Virtuousness represents the best of the human condition or the highest aspirations human beings hold for themselves. In organizations, virtuousness is often manifest in collective displays of moral excellence. It signifies a core concept within positive organizational scholarship (POS), and the legitimacy and credibility of POS is at least partly d...

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...

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...

Responsible leadership is rare. It is not that most leaders are irresponsible, but responsibility in leadership is frequently defined so that an important connotation of responsible leadership is ignored. This article equates responsible leadership with virtuousness. Using this connotation implies that responsible leadership is based on three assum...

Emphasis on positivity in organizations in increasing, but the importance and credibility of a positive approach to change—exemplified by positive organizational scholarship—remains controversial. More empirical evidence is needed showing that positive practices in organizations produce desirable changes in organizational effectiveness. Two studies...

This chapter outlines a process for diagnosing and changing organizational culture. It uses the Competing Values Framework to describe a validated approach to helping an organization change from a current culture to a desired culture.

Kim Cameron reports on two decades of empirical research on organizations that have faced difficult economic situations but achieved unexpected and exceptional levels of success. Examining these organizations, Cameron has uncovered some unusual leadership strategies that can serve as guidelines for organizations facing trying times. These strategie...

Positive organizational change has emerged in the last decade as an attempt to rebalance organizational change research and to examine previously ignored relationships in the discipline of positive organizational scholarship (POS). Not all airlines handled the crisis following the September 11, 2001 (9/11) terrorist attacks the same way and an anal...

Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) is a relatively new development in organizational studies, having formally begun with a 2003 edited collection of the same name (Cameron, et al., 2003b). Since that time, it has attracted considerable attention (e.g., George, 2004; Fineman, 2006; Caza and Caza, 2007; Roberts, 2006). The theoretical basis an...

This book focuses on a new and emerging, yet as old as recorded history, organizational concern: virtue. Virtue has recently become a topic of serious examination among organizational researchers and progressive companies who are exploring their role in creating new, more holistic, healthy, and humane work environments. With interdisciplinary insig...

Moneyball (Lewis, 2003) is a book about baseball. The book describes how a small-market Major League Baseball team, the Oakland Athletics, has been able to compete with large-market teams by being innovative in a tradition-laden industry. However, when read through a business management lens, one discerns that this baseball book, in fact, has gener...

As professors of management and organizational behavior mature in their teaching, they should begin to develop a teachable point of view. In this article, the author describes several attributes of a teachable point of view. Based on his own teaching experience, the author outlines five criteria for the content of the material taught—the what of te...

Moneyball (Lewis, 2003) is a book about baseball. The book describes how a small-market Major League Baseball team, the Oakland Athletics, has been able to compete with large-market teams by being innovative in a tradition-laden industry. However, when read through a business management lens, one discerns that this baseball book, in fact, has gener...

Newly emerging research in the field of positive organizational scholarship (POS) is beginning to demonstrate why an emphasis on virtuousness, not merely ethics, is necessary for successful organizational performance. I explain one reason why positive practices, not merely the absence of negative or harmful practices, should be emphasized in the ma...

'I recommend this book to anyone wishing to understand and practice leadership. Leadership is often treated in mutually-exclusive categories, such as Theory X vs. Theory Y, managers vs. leaders, transactional vs. transformative, initiation vs. consideration, etc. The Competing Values Framework presented in this book transcends these dualities. It f...

Virtuousness refers to the pursuit of the highest aspirations in the human condition. It is characterized by human impact, moral goodness, and unconditional societal betterment. Several writers have recently argued that corporations, in addition to being concerned with ethics, should also emphasize an ethos of virtuousness in corporate action. Virt...

This special issue focuses on virtues in organizations, even though the concept of virtues is more at home in philosophy, religion, and social services than in the for-profit world of business. Much attention has been paid to values in organizations, of course, but the definition and roles played by virtues in organizations differs substantially fr...

This paper examines how organizations heal after major trauma. We introduce the concept of organizational healing, which is different from resilience, adaptation, and hardiness. It refers to the actual work of repairing and mending the collective social fabric of an organization after some threat or shock to its system. Using a qualitative research...

The terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001 affected the U.S. airline industry more than almost any other industry. Certain of these companies emerged successful, however, and demonstrated remarkable resilience while others languished. This investigation identifies the reasons why some airline companies recovered successfully after the attacks wh...

Effectiveness is an elusive concept that can be approached through several models, none of which is appropriate in all circumstances.

Logical and moral arguments have been made for the organizational importance of ethos or virtuousness, in addition to ethics and responsibility. Research evidence is beginning to provide, empirical support for such normative claims. This paper considers the relationship between ethics and ethos in contemporary organizations by summarizing emerging...

The importance of virtuousness in organizations has recently been acknowledged in the organizational sciences, but research remains scarce. This article defines virtuousness and connects it to scholarly literature in organizational science. An empirical study is described in which the relationships between virtuousness and performance in 18 organiz...

Positive organizational scholarship is the study of that which is positive, flourishing, and life-giving in organizations. Positive refers to the elevating processes and outcomes in organizations. Organizational refers to the interpersonal and structural dynamics activated in and through organizations, specifically taking into account the context i...

The investigation of virtues in organizational life has been neglected. Systematic studies of the development and demonstration of virtue have been all but absent in the organizational sciences. This article highlights the potential impact of virtues in organizations, particularly the power of forgiveness to affect individual and collective outcome...

The amount of cutback, downsizing, and decline in U.S. higher education is at unprecedented levels and equals the prevalence of downsizing in the corporate sector. Because the consequence of downsizing in the private sector is often negative, the question arises: Does financial decline and downsizing in higher education also lead to organizational...

This paper reports a two-part analysis of the strategy and results of a downsizing initiative in the U.S. Army. Two data gathering efforts were conducted in a selected Army Command, one near the beginning of the downsizing initiative in 1992-1993 and one near the end in 1995-1996. Extreme cases are those in which unusual or exceptional attributes a...

What should be the appropriate measure of decline in institutions of higher education? Though different scholars emphasize either objective or perceptual indicators, we contend that studying the differences between objective and perceptual idicators of decline is itself a useful mechanism for theory-building. The authors examine 82 universities whe...

An investigation of downsizing in an Army organization was conducted in 1992 and 1993. The purpose of the study was to examine four questions: (1) What is the generalized orientation of this Army organization toward downsizing- -convergence or reorientation? (2) What downsizing procedures and strategies are being implemented? (3) What is the impact...

It is no secret that U.S. industry, once the most productive in the world, is now lagging behind its global competitors. What is not well known is that blue-collar productivity is not necessarily the problem. Between 1978 and 1986, for example, the number of production workers declilned by six percent while real output rose 15 percent. White-collar...

Conceptions of excellence, the quality of work life, value patterns, power relationships, stress factors, and so on have been found to differ among cultures throughout the world. The manner in which individuals perceive their own realities differs significantly among different cultures as individuals process cognitive cues in culturally homogeneous...

This study clarifies the meaning and conceptual domain of organizational decline by delimiting it operationally from the related constructs of turbulence, stagnation, and environmental decline. We investigated organizational attributes commonly associated in the literature with organizational decline and turbulence. These attributes, including incr...

This study demonstrates why organizational effectiveness studies are crucial in certain types of organizations, and it points out how many of the weaknesses and criticisms of past investigations can be addressed. The results of this study of 29 organizations indicate that certain managerial strategies are strongly associated with high static scores...

Successful strategies often take into account the apparently incompatible strengths and opportunities of the institution.

Determinants of organizational and administrative effectiveness in higher education are discussed, and eight administrator characteristics associated with maintaining and enhancing institutional effectiveness are identified. (MSE)

College and university administrators facing conditions of fiscal stress have responded with an increased emphasis on organizational efficiency and resource allocation. Research reported in this article suggests that these responses are detrimental to long-term organizational viability. A different set of strategies, found to be effective in privat...

This paper discusses the relationships between stage of development in organizational life cycles and organizational effectiveness. We begin the paper by reviewing nine models of organizational life cycles that have been proposed in the literature. Each of these models identifies certain characteristics that typify organizations in different stages...

A review of models of group and organization life cycle development is provided and the applicability of those models for institutions of higher education are discussed. An understanding of the problems and characteristics present in different life cycle stages can help institutions manage transitions more effectively. (Author/MLW)

A typology of environmental decline and organizational response, based on two dimensions of environmental change, is proposed. The typology provides a much finer-grained basis for examining organizational decline than is currently available. It also provides a mechanism through which the contradictory prescriptions for the management of decline tha...

Among the problems in the literature on organizational effectiveness are the over-reliance on researcher imposed criteria of effectiveness and the tendency to measure perceptions of effectiveness at only one point in time. In this study, we examine the changes that occurred in ratings of effectiveness by organizational members as their organization...

This study examines the concept of organizational effectiveness in institutions of higher education. Some obstacles to the assessment of organizational effectiveness in higher education are discussed, namely criteria problems and the unique organizational attributes of colleges and universities, and criteria choices addressing these issues are outl...

After experiencing organizational harm, damage, trauma, or injustice, one challenge facing leaders is to help the organization heal, replenish, restore efficacy and positive energy, and enhance resiliency. Fostering forgiveness is one effective mechanism for achieving those outcomes. This is a brief summary of guiding principles for leaders relatin...

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