Immerse
Research Articles
Job crafting and meaningful work
Using a positive organizational scholarship lens to enrich research on work-family relationships
Blog
Positive Sociology in the Classroom
March 5, 2014
“My recent visit with Jane Dutton of the University of Michigan’s Center for Positive Organizations inspired me to adapt some of their practical exercises for building leadership and thriving workplaces to my own classroom. Dutton and colleagues have created two tools, the Job Crafting Exercise, a tool designed to make people’s jobs more engaging and fulfilling, and the Reflected Best Self Exercise, which helps people identify their character strengths and help build on their unique strengths and talents.
Based on those tools, I created my own tool, which I called the Reflective Best Student Self and Reflective Best Classroom Exercise.”
The #1 Feature of a Meaningless Job
March 3, 2014
Ask people what they want in a job, and meaningfulness looms large. For decades, Americans have ranked purpose as their top priority—above promotions, income, job security, and hours. Work is a search “for daily meaning as well as daily bread,” wrote Studs Turkel after interviewing hundreds of people in a striking array of jobs. Yet all too often, we feel that our work doesn’t matter. “Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people.”
What makes a job meaningless? After more than 40 years of research, we know that people struggle to find meaning when they lack autonomy, variety, challenge, performance feedback, and the chance to work on a whole product or service from start to finish. As important as these factors are, though, there’s another that matters more.
Videos
Does College Lead to Engaging Work and High Wellbeing?
February 24, 2014
This Positive Links Speaker Series session features Brandon Busteed (Gallup), who offers data-driven insights about the current state of higher education.
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Tools
Job Crafting Exercise™
The Job Crafting Exercise™ helps you make your job more engaging and fulfilling. The idea is to view your job in a new way — as a flexible set of building blocks rather than a fixed list of duties. Using this perspective, you create a visual plan for redesigning your job to better suit your values, strengths, and passions.
Reflected Best Self Exercise™
The Reflected Best Self Exercise™ (RBSE™) enables people to identify their unique strengths and talents, making it an excellent tool for personal development. Each participant requests positive feedback from significant people in his or her life and then synthesizes it into a cumulative portrait of his or her “best self.”
The 2nd Edition of the Reflected Best Self Exercise™ (RBSE™) features the most useful elements of the booklet Bringing My Reflected Best Self to Life, which was retired in 2011.
Events | News
Positive Links Speaker Series Session: Reimagining the Treatment of Pain
Afton Hassett is a licensed clinical psychologist and an Associate Research Scientist in the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Michigan Medical School.
Positive Links Speaker Series Session: Title to be announced
Robert J. Vallerand has completed the Ph.D at the University of Montreal and postdoctoral studies in Experimental Social Psychology at the University of Waterloo. He started his career as an assistant professor at the University of Guelph and then moved to the Université du Québec à Montréal where he is now a Full Professor of Social Psychology.
Positive Business Conference
The Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan is the leading center of excellence globally for positive business. We believe that business can be an extraordinary vehicle for positive change in today’s dynamic global economy. On May 15-17, 2014, join us for the inaugural Ross Positive Business Conference. Together, we will explore the most inspiring and […]
