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What does it mean to flourish as a school principal? What can we learn from inquiring into the positive emotional and social aspects of the work of school leaders? These questions reflect our interest in using a positive organizational perspective to carry out research with those who work in school organizations (Cherkowski and Walker, 2013a, b, 2014). This perspective aligns with a growing shift in psychology and organizational studies to frame research using phenomena and constructs such as resilience, compassion, hope, efficacy, self-determination and meaningfulness at work and in other areas of life. Research findings from the disciplines of both positive psychology and positive organization studies are useful as we join with others to bring these positive research intelligences into the field of education to study what works, what goes well, what supports and fosters a full sense of humanity through work and what brings vitality to people in school organizations.
In essence, this positive turn in research reflects an intentional shift away from deficit-oriented understandings of well-being (i.e. as merely the absence of illness) towards a positive understanding of well-being (i.e. as the presence of health). There is a growing base of research findings on the antecedents, benefits and consequences of positive emotions and feeling good (cf. Lyubomirsky et al., 2005; Seligman, 2002; Fredrickson, 2005, 2008). Increasingly, extant understandings of well-being include both hedonic aspects of feeling good (positive emotions) and more eudemonic aspects of living well. These include experiences of positive relationships, meaningfulness in life and work, together with senses of mastery and personal growth, as well as autonomy or achievement (Keyes, 2002; Seligman, 2002; Huta and Ryan, 2010; Keyes and Annas, 2009). This broader understanding of well-being, with emotional, psychological and social components, has been characterized in psychological research as flourishing and is recognized as experienced on a continuum (Keyes, 2002; Ryff and Keyes, 1995; Seligman, 2011). Although there are several measurements of flourishing that encompass both emotional aspects of feeling good and a more eudemonic notion of living well, the studies are generally conducted from a context-free perspective. There are relatively few studies that focus specifically on flourishing in workplaces (Mehrotra and Ravikesh, 2014), and seldom do these studies focus on flourishing in the context of leading school organizations.
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