Symposium 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

New Approaches To Assess And Improve Employee Flourishing Across Cultures (#284)

Stewart I Donaldson 1 , Scott I Donaldson 1
  1. Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, United States

 

Positive Organizational Psychology strives to create workplaces that facilitate optimal employee functioning and organizational effectiveness (Donaldson & Ko, 2010; Warren, Donaldson, & Luthans, 2018). This presentation will explore the value of expanding Seligman’s PERMA model to include positive mindset, positive health, positive environment, and positive security (a total of nine elements) to better understand and measure the flourishing of employees working across different organizational and national cultures.  In an effort to control for the fatal flaw of response bias in many workplace studies based solely on self-reports, co-worker pairs were sampled and a multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) measurement design and analysis strategy was used to establish the construct validity of the nine flourishing elements, and demonstrate their links to desired employee work characteristics (e.g., adaptive performance, job satisfaction, intention to turnover, stress, etc.). The empirical findings from this investigation suggest new and improved approaches for designing and evaluating workplace interventions aimed at promoting employee flourishing and performance across cultures. The implications of relying solely on self-report measures of human flourishing, expanding the original five PERMA elements to nine in the workplace, and measuring human flourishing across cultures will be discussed.