Positive Organizational Change: What the Field of Positive Organizational Scholarship Offers to Organization Development Practitioners

Positive organizational change has emerged in the last decade as an attempt to rebalance organizational change research and to examine previously ignored relationships in the discipline of positive organizational scholarship (POS). Not all airlines handled the crisis following the September 11, 21 (9/11) terrorist attacks the same way and an analysis of the 10 airline companies' response to the tragedy uncovered an important finding. The airlines, such as the Southwest Airlines, that engaged in positive practices experienced significantly higher financial return than those that did not. This chapter describes the emerging field of POS and its connection to organization development (OD). The case of the airline industry following September 11, 21, provides an illustration of positively deviant organizational performance, a key focus of POS research. The chapter concludes with an overview of POS findings.