ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR

Organizational Behavior

Organizational Behavior

1. Introduction

Two approaches, positive organizational behavior (POB) and authentic leadership (AL) are becoming increasingly important in the organizational sciences literature. POB has been most fully developed by Lufthansa et al. ([Lufthansa, 2002] and [Lufthansa et al., 2001]). Building on the work of Seligman (1998) and Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi (2000) on positive psychology, Luthans proposes POB as focusing on positive feelings, in general, and on the sub-concepts of confidence/self-efficacy, hope, optimism, subjective well-being/happiness, and emotional intelligence, in particular. Specifically, Luthans (2002) defines POB “as the study and application of positively oriented human resource strengths and psychological capacities that can be measured, developed, and effectively managed for performance improvement” (p. 59).

2. Purpose and overview

To date, in our opinion, there has been no real attempt to fully integrate these related notions of POB and AL in a meso, multi-level approach. Given (1) the increasing importance of these concepts in the organizational sciences, (2) the potential their integration offers for enhanced understanding of both organizational behavior in general and leadership in particular, and (3) the acknowledged importance of considering levels of analysis issues in both theory building and theory testing (see below), it seems critical to pursue such a multi-level approach.

Our purpose here is not to provide an extensive critique and review of POB or the “positive movement” in general, as these have been presented in detail elsewhere (e.g., [Bakker and Schaufeli, 2008], [Fineman, 2006a], [Fineman, 2006b], [Roberts, 2006], [Luthans, 2002] and [Seligman and Csikszentimihalyi, 2000]). Nor is it our purpose to provide a detailed critique and review of AL or “authentic leader development”, as this too has been presented previously (e.g., [Cooper et al., 2005], [Gardner et al., 2005a], [Gardner et al., 2005b], [Avolio and Gardner, 2005] and [Luthans and Avolio, 2003]). Rather, our intent is to first demonstrate, through content coding of previously published AL articles, that this work resides primarily at the individual level of analysis. The POB literature generally acknowledges the importance of and primary focus on the individual level in conceptual work; empirical studies in this literature are conducted at the individual level of analysis; and critiques of the POB literature make the point that the focus is individual differences (see [Bakker and Schaufeli, 2008] and [Luthans et al., 2007]). In contrast, the AL literature implies and often refers to or claims that it is conceptually multi-level in nature. Thus it seems important to verify (or refute) this assertion from the AL literature before proceeding to multi-level theory building. As such, we conducted a content coding of AL (but not POB) articles. Moreover, we have identified and included the extant population to date of conceptual and empirical work, or feasible set of articles, for coding (as described below).

Then, building from this levels-of-analysis assessment, our second intent is to develop a preliminary meso, multi-level model of AL and POB that can be the subject of future multi-level testing. To accomplish this second purpose, we draw on several prior multi-level leadership approaches and [Yammarino et ...