Positive Psychology at Work:

Summary

In this chapter we have examined the importance of positive emotions to both good communication and good decision-making. Research illuminating how high-risk organizations achieve high reliability helps us to understand the importance of ambivalence and sense-making over certainty and decision-making to ensure adaptive behaviour. These findings support our suggestion that the organization is more helpfully thought of as a complex adaptive system, with some built-in redundancy and diversity, than as an efficient machine if we want to ensure good communication and decision-making. We have also noticed how organizational structures, and mindsets, can mitigate against high quality, informal, fragmentary yet highly valuable coordinating communication and decision-making. We have noticed that compensatory action may have to be taken to ensure that good quality coordination and synchronism can be achieved across organizational processes.