December 15, 2014

4:00 PM - 5:00 PM, Reception Immediately Following

The Colloquium, 6th Floor, Ross Building, Stephen M. Ross School of Business


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Amy Wrzesniewski is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at Yale University’s School of Management.  Professor Wrzesniewski earned a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology from the University of Michigan. She has won the IBM Faculty Award for her research, and has won awards for her undergraduate, graduate, and executive teaching. Her research focuses on how people make meaning of their work in challenging contexts (e.g., stigmatized occupations, virtual contexts, absence of work), and the experience of work as a job, career, or calling.

Session Description: The chances are good that at some point, you have changed an aspect of your job so that it better suited you. Whether you took a different approach to a task you were responsible for, changed an interaction pattern with someone at work, or refined how you thought about the job in a more general sense, you were engaging in job crafting. Job crafting is defined as “the physical and cognitive changes individuals make in the task or relational boundaries of their work” and encompasses a vast range of bottom-up moves made by employees to create a more optimal design of their jobs. For example, job crafting occurs when a marketing manager decides to bring her passion for social media into the design of a product launch. In this session, we will take a hands-on approach to exploring how job crafting works, the benefits it holds for employees and their organizations, and the ways that leaders can support job crafting efforts. If the idea and practice of job crafting captures your imagination, please take a look at the Job Crafting Exercise.

The Positive Links Speaker Series 2014-15 season features contributing authors of How To Be a Positive Leader: Small Actions, Big Impact.

Positive leaders are able to dramatically expand their people’s—and their own—capacity for excellence. And they accomplish this without enormous resources or huge heroic gestures. Leading scholars describe how this is being done at organizations such as Wells Fargo, Ford, Kelly Services, Burt’s Bees, Connecticut’s Griffin Hospital, the Michigan-based Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, and many others. Like the butterfly in Brazil whose flapping wings create a typhoon in Texas, you can create profound positive change in your organization through simple actions and attitude shifts. Please join us to learn how.

Free and open to the public.

The Center for Positive Organizations thanks Diane and Paul Jones (Ross School of Business MBA 1975), for their generous gift in support of the 2014-2015 Positive Links Speaker Series.