Creating and Sustaining Positive Organizations

By Ryan Quinn

Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) is the type of research that scholars do when they study organizational phenomena with explicitly positive questions. For example, rather than ask, “What are the effects of power on silencing in organizations?” a POS scholar might ask, “Under what conditions do even those with low power in organizations feel empowered to voice their thoughts and concerns?” Or, rather than ask, “What makes accidents inevitable in complex organizations, and POS scholar might ask, “How do some organizations achieve such extraordinary levels of reliability, that accidents are extremely rare?”

By asking questions like these, POS scholars are making two conscious choices. First, they are acknowledging that many, if not most, research questions about the behavior of organizations or of humans in organizations have ethical implications–whether the issue involves the pressures that silence employees, the responsibility to create safe and reliable organizations, or any other issue. Second, rather than focus on ethical problems, ethical dilemmas, and ethical failures, they are making an explicit choice to study exceptionally ethical behavior–whether it comes in the form of relational affirmation, pragmatic adaptation, practicing virtue, or market performance.

Teaching Ethics

POS scholars teach as well as do research. The ethical focus of their teaching is increasingly important in a world with accounting scandals, global financial crises, failing firms with government buy-outs, possible pandemics, massive health care reform, and countless other pressing issues. As I have written in the past, there  is a tendency to create or to reinforce the phenomena that we study and teach. [1] Thus, in the society we have created, it is more important than ever for us to study and to teach exceptionally ethical organizational behavior.

I have the privilege of teaching in a school that has an impressive infrastructure for teaching ethical behavior. I also have the privilege of having an office across the hall from the Business Roundtable’s Institute for Corporate Ethics. Recently, my colleagues Lisa Stewart and Brian Moriarty addressed the topic of how ethics should be taught in business schools by conducting video interviews with a number of Darden professors about how they incorporate ethics into their classes, and how ethics professors should address their topic in their own classes. In my interview I focused on how to teach change management with an ethical lens, and how ethics classes should incorporate a change management perspective. This interview follows:

Other Topics

Change management is just one topic in which ethics should be incorporated into MBA and Executive Education. To see how my colleagues address the incorporation of ethics into executive education, accounting, communications, finance, diversity, and many other topics, please see their videos as well, which can be found here.

[1] Gergen, K. 1994. Realities and Relationships: Soundings in Social Construction. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.

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