PART TWOPOSITIVE STATES, TRAITS AND

PART TWO
POSITIVE STATES, TRAITS AND PROCESSES
The fundamental tenet of ‘Positive Organization Scholarship’ (Cameron
et al., 2003) is that organizational management and decision settings need
to be reframed in a positive light. It follows therefore that managers need
to shift their focus to the positive aspects of organizational functioning
and achievement, rather than dwell on the defensive measures needed to
deal with real and imagined negative contingencies. A corollary of this
view, first advanced by Staw et al. (1994), and more recently confirmed by
Lyubomirsky et al. (2005), is that such organizations need also to be
characterized by positive, rather than negative emotion. More recently,
Ashkanasy and Daus (2002) have described these organizations in terms
of a ‘healthy emotional climate’. Consistent with this proposition and
based on a multi-level model of emotions in organizations (Ashkanasy,
2003a; Ashkanasy and Ashton-James, 2005), we outline in this chapter
how organizations can engender positive emotion, and conclude that positive
emotion is a necessary precondition of positive organizational
behavior.
Although Isen and Baron (1991) identified the importance of mild
positive affect in organizational behavior 15 years ago, since then much
of the literature that has dealt with emotions in the workplace has
focused on negative emotions. For example, Fitness (2000) studied ‘anger
in the workplace’, Ashkanasy and Nicholson (2003) studied the ‘climate
of fear’, while Frost (2003) focused on ‘toxic emotions’, including their
antecedents and consequences, and prescriptions for dealing with toxic
emotions. In this chapter, we return to the spirit of Isen and Baron’s seminal
article and emphasize the link between positive emotion and exceptional
performance in organizational contexts. Also, and consistent with
Isen (2003), we argue that positive emotions are associated with individual
and group creativity. More recently, Lyubomirsky et al. (2005)
found, in an extensive meta-analysis, that positive affect leads to more