Positive Psychology at Work:

Developing Strategy

Bringing all this together, this research into leadership and successful change suggests that change is best approached as an emergent phenomenon, and that skilled leadership behaviour is authentic, positive and able to maintain and work with system ambiguity. This suggests that strategy also needs to be viewed somewhat differently. Wooten and Cameron suggest we should start to see strategy as ‘a set of processes that enables collective resourcefulness and generative dynamics that lead to positive states or outcomes’ (2010, p. 54). Collective resourcefulness refers to the manner in which organizational members work together to develop and implement strategy through policies and practices, while generative dynamics refers to organizational activities that create, develop, transform, multiply and leverage its resources and capabilities. The development of new capabilities makes it possible for the organization to respond to changing environments with value-adding strategies. Cameron has built on this work with his development of the competing values framework to help leaders with their strategic challenges (see Supplement 5.11).

1) Competing values framework

This framework can be seen as an expression of the ambiguity inherent in complex adaptive systems. It illuminates the predominant strategies available to organizations as they seek to resolve the ambiguity. Each quadrant offers feasible organizational and leadership strategies. No particular one is right or ...