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 employment, consolidated activities, and retrenched operations also experienced 12 negative, dysfunctional outcomes. I referred to them as “the dirty dozen,” and they included factors such as increased confl ict, restricted communication, escalating politicking, scapegoating leaders, the threatrigidity 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.
