ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on applying insights from positive organizational scholarship (POS) to better understand work—family relationships. POS highlights positive deviance within organizational studies. It provides a generative dynamics in organizations that contribute to human strengths and virtues, resilience and healing, vitality and thriving, and the cultivation of extraordinary states in individuals, groups, and organizations. The chapter provides a more comprehensive approach to applying a positive lens to work–family relationships. It describes background on POS and how it offers new insights in organizational behavior generally. The chapter examines the current literature on work—family relationships emphasizing developments that have a positive orientation. It identifies a number of ways in which a POS lens might offer new insights for understanding work–family relationships. The chapter suggests that additional ways that a POS lens may open up new insights into the work-family literature. It concludes with directions for future research and implications for practice.
