ABSTRACT
I became interested in Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) as a result of studying organizational downsizing in the USA during the 1980s and 1990s. In those research projects, I discovered that a large majority of organizations that abolished jobs, eliminated employees, consolidated activities, and retrenched operations also experienced 12 negative, dysfunctional outcomes. I referred to those outcomes as “the dirty dozen,” and they included factors such as increased conflict, restricted communication, escalating politicking, scapegoating leaders, the threat-rigidity response, destruction of trust, worsening morale, and so forth. As you would expect, the emergence of these factors produced declining performance in the vast majority of downsizing organizations.
