Edward H. Powley

Reclaiming resilience and safety: Resilience activation in the critical period of crisis

When external events disrupt the normal flow of organizational and relational routines and practices, an organization’s latent capacity to rebound activates to enable positive adaptation and bounce back. This article examines an unexpected organizational crisis (a shooting and standoff in a business school) and presents a model for how resilience becomes activated in such situations. Three social mechanisms describe resilience activation. Liminal suspension describes how crisis temporarily undoes and alters formal relational structures and opens a temporal space for organization members to form and renew relationships. Compassionate witnessing describes how organization members’ interpersonal connections and opportunities for engagement respond to individuals’ needs. And relational redundancy describes how organization members’ social capital and connections across organizational and functional boundaries activate relational networks that enable resilience. Narrative accounts from the incident support the induced model.

Tending Wounds Elements of the Organizational Healing Process

The authors extend the metaphor of wound healing in medicine to organizations and propose a model of organizational healing. Organizational healing differs from resilience, hardiness, and recovery and refers to the actual work of repairing and mending the collective social fabric of an organization after crisis. Using a qualitative research study based on interview data gathered after a shooting incident in a Midwestern university, the authors propose a model of organizational healing that includes three stages of healing and six key enablers: inflammation—prioritizing individual in need of urgent care and minimizing the potential for recriminations; proliferation—fostering high-quality connections and improvising on routines; and remodeling—strengthening a family organizational culture and initiating ceremonies and rituals. The authors offer implications for how organizations manage these enablers after crisis and suggest that organizations adopting these are more likely to experience healing.

The Process and Mechanisms of Organizational Healing

Organizational healing refers to the work of repairing practices, routines, and structures in the face of disruption and strengthening organizational functioning through social relationships. Healing, more than resilience, coping, or recovery, enables greater organizational strength than what previously existed. Its unique characteristics make it an important construct for further explaining what accounts for developing exceptional organizational systems. Based on the financial and economic challenges facing Prudential Real Estate after the housing market crash in 2008, and parallels from physiological healing processes, I provide an in-depth description of the process of organizational healing that is supported by four mechanisms: empathy, interventions, collective effort, and leadership. Together the process and mechanisms explain how organizational healing enables both resilience and strengthening. These mechanisms point to activities practitioners and leaders may consider when promoting virtuous human systems.

Is it ok to care? How compassion falters and is courageously accomplished in the midst of uncertainty:

This article elaborates the organizational literature’s process theory of compassion – an empathic response to suffering – which falls short of adequately explaining why and how compassion unfolds readily in some workplace situations or settings but not in others. We address this shortcoming by calling attention to the basic uncertainty of suffering and compassion, demonstrating that this uncertainty tends to be particularly pronounced in organizational settings, and presenting propositions that explain how such uncertainty inhibits the compassion process. We then argue that understanding the accomplishment of compassion in the midst of uncertainty necessitates regarding compassion as an enactment of courage, and we incorporate insights from the organizational literature on everyday courageous action into compassion theory. We conclude with a discussion of implications in which we underscore the importance of organizational support for the expression of suffering and the doing of compassion, and we also consider directions for future research.

Pedagogical Approaches to Develop Critical Thinking and Crisis Leadership

Management schools must be prepared to aid leaders and managers to succeed in uncertain environments. We offer two approaches, each designed for critical thinking skill development, to teach graduate management students about leading in and through potential disruption to organizational life. First, we present a personalized case method that relies on a critical incident approach to examine crises students personally experienced at work. We provide a description of the student assignment and a process for student analysis. Second, we present a group project involving a poster session in which students collaboratively work on complex crisis leadership challenges and present their analysis to their peers. We describe how these two approaches develop the critical skills effective crisis leaders possess.

Exploring the generative potential between positive organizational scholarship and management, spirituality, and religion research

Though conceptually distinct, the fields of positive organizational scholarship (POS) and management, spirituality, and religion (MSR) consider various phenomena in common. In this paper, we address a range of topics that both disciplines explore, as well as topics that are exclusive to one domain but that may inform and enrich the other. We identify shared criticisms that both domains have faced and highlight different paths each field has taken toward establishing legitimacy. Our aim is to identify mutually relevant terrain where MSR research and POS can inform and enrich each other.

If You Can't Trust, Stick to Hierarchy: Structure and Trust as Contingency Factors in Threat Assessment Contexts

Organizations have and will continue to face threats and crisis from a number of sources. We study trust from a contingency theory framework and hypothesize that trust levels vary depending on different organizational designs. Using data from the laboratory experimentation tool ELICIT, a multiplayer simulation, we examine the effect of trust levels and organizational design on performance. We find that trust and organizational design have strong interactions and that hierarchical organizations experience performance levels well below flexible organizational structures. We offer implications for managers who are responsible for identifying and responding to threat and crises.

THE GENERATIVE POTENTIAL OF CYNICAL CONVERSATIONS

Abstract A common concern raised in opposition to Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is that a focus on life-giving images in organizations tends to suppress negative voices. It is supposed that AI sees little value in skeptical, cynical, or negative perspectives. However, when AI is properly understood, all voices – both positive and negative – are seen as essential to the life of organization. The challenge is to create an atmosphere in which the cynical voice, rather than perpetuating dysfunction, can be tapped to build generativity. This chapter describes how to accomplish this objective through the use of analogic inquiry, thus exploring the focus on generativity that is central to AI.