Working Positively Toward Transformative Cooperation  

Leslie E. Sekerka and Barbara L. Fredrickson

Edited by Nicola Garcea, Susan Harrington, and P. Alex Linley
Print Publication Date: Nov 2009
Subject: Psychology, Organizational Psychology, Social Psychology
Online Publication Date: Sep 2012
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195335446.013.0007

Abstract:

Emotions are an integral part of human experience, inextricably linked to social interaction. In this chapter Sekerka and Fredrickson describe how positive emotional climates help create and support transformative cooperation. Serving as the fuel for new and useful relationships in organizational environments, they examine the broadening and building capacities of positive emotions and how they contribute to purposive evolution. Strength-based organizational development and change processes are described as the means to evoke positive emotions in support of transformative cooperation, which emerges through collectively beneficial processes. The authors set forth a description and definition of this phenomenon and explain how their work advances positive psychology and associated fields such as positive organizational scholarship and positive organizational behavior.