Positively deviant - Kim Cameron and POS

What I find refreshing and inspirational is that actual companies and business schools are even starting to think about humans in positive ways.

According to professor Kim Cameron, at the University of MIchigan's Ross School of Business,  there is too much focus on what's wrong and not enough focus on what's right.

Organizations have been designed to remove deviance, or departure from the norm, with a goal of removing what's wrong, but in the process have been also punishing what's right. Conformity becomes the goal,  instead of productive diversity.

Here's what he says about this new way of thinking:

It focuses on the dynamics in organizations that lead to the development of human strength, foster vitality and flourishing in employees, make possible resilience and restoration, and cultivate extraordinary individual and organizational performance.

This emphasis parallels the new movement in psychology that has shifted from a traditional focus on illness and pathology—e.g., deviancy, abnormality, and therapy—toward a positive psychology focusing on human strengths, virtues, positive affect, and what makes life worth living.

Similarly, positive organizational scholarship examines the positive side of
organizational performance. It investigates positive deviance, or the ways in
which organizations and their members flourish and prosper in extraordinary
ways

There's a whole page of links to free video's on this subject, covering the collected best talks of the best researchers at the University of Michigan in this area, which he calls Positive Organizational Scholarship  or POS.

That title is to emphasize that this site is based on academic research that has been published in peer-reviewed journals, not just some person's thoughts about what might be true. It describes what the evidence shows actually works in practice, and who is working on it now.

Some of the topics with free videos you can download from there:

 "Making the Impossible Possible" - The Rocky Flats cleanup
 "Improving Quality of Life in Old Age: Field Experiments in Retirement Communities"
 "Democratizing Commerce: The Challenge for the 21st Century"
 "POS in Action: Creating Empowered Practice Environments."
"Bringing Yourself to Your Work: Leveraging the Strength of Diversity to Generate Authentic Engagement"
"Positive Self-Regard: Origins, Benefits, Possible Costs"
"The Place of Pleasure in the Meaningful Life"
"Psyched Up or Psyched Out? The Influence of Co-actor Status on Individual Performance"
"Thriving At Work"
 

Professor Cameron's personal web site has many more fascinating links on it as well.

He and his coworkers also have a consulting business, Competing Values, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

technorati tags:Cameron, kimcameron, pos, positiveorganizationalscholarship, positivedeviance, deviance, psychology, organizations, organization_theory