PS5541: POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY AT WORK (2023-2024)

In exploring current challenges which impact on workplace performance and productivity, students will consider how insights from positive psychology to understand and evaluation these challenges for organisations.

The main tenets of positive psychology theory include:

• How positive psychology focuses on the individual being fulfilled, the community thriving and creating work settings which provides the greatest satisfaction amongst workers.
• Focus on strengths and aligning these with our career choices and goals.
• Having valued subjective experiences: wellbeing, contentment, satisfaction (in the past), hope, optimism (for the future) and flow and happiness (in the present).
• Moves away from the disease model: i.e. focuses on what is right rather than what is wrong.

We will consider how the PERMA model can help increase resilience by increasing positive emotions, engagement, positive relationships, meaning and accomplishment.

We will analyse the strengths-based approach and consider its advantages and disadvantages. We will reflect on the value of allocating work-based tasks on the basis of strengths and what impact this has on performance and productivity.

We will consider how developing psychological capital can help us to respond to challenges and develop problem-solving skills and the role that developing and sustaining high quality connections in the workplace can play in collaboration and problem-solving, for instance. We will analyse the positive psychology approaches to leadership and explore their effectiveness in informing and overcoming key workplace challenges such as organisational change.

We will also explore emotional intelligence and how it helps individuals and leaders to understand their own emotions and those of others. It will also explore how to develop emotional intelligence and the role it has in developing leaders.

The course will also explore the use of the appreciative inquiry approach which advocates asking questions and being able to envision the future in order to foster positive workplace relationships. We will reflect on learned helplessness (Seligman and Maier, 1967) whereby individuals engage in a behaviour pattern involving a maladaptive response characterised by the avoidance of challenges, negative affect and the collapse of problem-solving strategies when obstacles arise and the impact this has in the workplace performance.

There are no assessments for this course.