Creating and Sustaining Positive Organizations

By Ryan Quinn

I recently received a link to a video from one of our fabulous-and-soon-to-be-graduates MBA students, Mike Peters (to see the video, click here). The video is a news report about a number of elderly workers who had recovered from leprosy and started running a profitable automobile parts factory. It is a wonderful illustration of why leaders should care about the meaning that their employees find in their work. Some of the points it illustrates include:

• Performance (e.g., notice the comments about the factory’s productivity)
• High-quality relationships (e.g., the man who says “We enjoy working, living together. We take care of each other.”)
• Learning and improvement (e.g., the woman who says “”It was difficult, but now I am comfortable.”)
• Self-esteem, and work and life satisfaction (e.g., the man who says, “Instead of begging on the streets we wanted to live with our heads held high.”)

There is research to support each of these observations, suggesting that meaningful work can be beneficial for both employees and their organizations.*

What Makes Work Meaningful?

Mike Pratt and Blake Ashforth wrote a chapter on the meaning of work** in the inaugural book on Positive Organizational Scholarship that identifies factors that make work meaningful to people. The meaningfulness of work has two components: the meaning we find in our work (in other words, from what we do), and the meaning we find atour work (in other words, the meaning we find in our membership and relationships). Leaders can take a number of actions that will enhance the meaning that their employees find in their work, such as:

• Designing jobs with features such as autonomy, complexity, and the ability to complete whole pieces of work
• Involving employees in decision making
• Putting people in positions that they feel “called” to perform
• Developing and nurture the organizational culture
• Providing clear and inspiring visions
• Fostering communities
• Promoting psychological safety
• Acting with Integrity

There are probably other things leaders can do in addition to these. And each of these issues is worth a blog entry of its own. Here, I will simply give two examples of ways to develop and nurture a meaningful organizational culture from the research of Karen Golden-Biddle, Kathy GermAnn, Trish Reay, and Gladys Procyshen.*** Their research examined the legacy of the Wetoka Health Unit (WHU) in Alberta, Canada.

Meaningfulness and Organizational Culture

WHU was a public health organization recognized nationally for its innovation and performance. The employees of WHU found deep meaning in both in their work (what they did) and at their work (in their relationships with their clients and fellow employees). This meaning motivated and guided them in achieving high performance.

Although WHU was achieving high performance, the province of Alberta decided to restructure the entire health delivery system, of which WHU was a small part. This broke up WHU and formed new organizations with broader service offerings. The leaders of WHU, recognizing the role that their culture played in the performance of their unit and the value that their employees found in their culture, began talking to their employees about what was most important about their culture that they wanted to preserve. Through these discussions, they created an image of a wheel that displayed the cultural values that they most wanted to preserve and how those values fit together. They used these values to talk about the change, train employees for the change, and to take initiative within the change. When there was pressure to focus on other things, these managers took the time to tend their culture by

1. making cultural symbols material (by drawing and distributing the values wheel),
2. discussing what these symbols mean for their everyday work, and
3. applying their insights into their work.

These three activities are critical for nurturing meaningful cultures, and the impact was profound and long-lasting. During the system change, it was often the former WHU employees who took initiative and led the transition teams of the new health units. They implemented values and created positive relationships that diminished the turf wars that might otherwise have occurred as old employees merged into new units. Ten years later, Golden-Biddle and her colleagues found pockets of WHU cultures thriving throughout the health system.

When we make valued symbols material, they remind and inspire us. Conversation helps us to make sense of what these symbols mean, and application the symbols real and relevant. Work becomes meaningful, we are motivated to do it, we find enjoyment in it, and we strengthen our friendships and our ability to work together with those who also find the work meaningful, just like the senior citizens in the auto parts plant.

Epilogue: A Caution

Golden-Biddle and her colleague’s analysis of WHU made one other critical observation-successful development of organizational depends on positive relationships. There is much that can be said about this observation, and we will certainly discuss positive relationships more in this blog. For now it is sufficient to observe that without these positive relationships and the concern for others that such relationships imply, efforts to influence the meaningfulness people experience at work can be seen as manipulative, and can undermine what a leader is trying to accomplish. With positive relationships, though, meaningful cultures and positive relationships can reinforce each other and contribute to the kind of high performance work systems we see in WHU and in the senior citizens’ auto parts factory.

* This list is intended to be only a brief summary of some research findings. It is not intended to be a detailed description. There are many nuances within this work that we should be aware of and that we will address in future blog entries.

** Pratt, Michael G. & Ashford, Blake E. (2003). Fostering Meaningfulness in Working and at Work. In K. S. Cameron, J. E. Dutton, and R. E. Quinn (Eds.) Positive Organizational Scholarship: Foundations of a New Discipline (pp. 309-327). San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

*** Golden-Biddle, Karen; GermAnn, Kathy; Reay, Trish; & Procyshen, Gladys (2007). Creating and Sustaining Positive Organizational Relationships: A Cultural Perspective. In Jane E. Dutton & Belle Rose Ragins (Eds.), Exploring Positive Relationships at Work: Building a Theoretical and Research Foundation (pp. 289-305). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 30th, 2009 at 8:36 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.