Enhancing Employee Well-Being Using Appreciative Inquiry

Corporate organization can be a difficult place to be in. There is always high competition and pressure to perform, leading to high stress levels. In order to remain competitive, organizations constantly endeavour to improve processes and performance by finding what is going wrong and fixing it. While this is a necessary exercise for organizational growth, the discovery of what is going wrong can elicit negative feelings in the organization. It can result in despondency, which can impact the emotional climate of the organization. This negative climate has a snowballing effect on employee well-being, motivation, satisfaction, and ultimately performance.

So, what is a better way to approach organizational problems? Positive psychology has shown a new pathway in this direction. An increasing number of organizations are now adopting positive psychological approaches to address individual, group and organizational level issues. Positive psychological approaches in organizations guide people to focus on strengths rather than weaknesses. At the individual level, this implies focusing on the positives in life, undertaking actions that enhance self-esteem and happiness, and developing positive mental models. At the organizational level, this means focusing on the professional, team and organizational strengths and planning actions based on these strengths.

Tools from positive psychology, such as appreciative inquiry, can prove very useful in this regard. This tool, developed by David Cooperrider and Suresh Srivastava is widely used in the context of organizational change, but the basic principles are applicable in varied contexts. It can be used to develop a positive organizational climate as well where employees approach issues using a positive perspective. There are four iterative steps of appreciative inquiry:

Discover – This phase involves identifying all that is positive or good with an individual, group or organization. It focuses on identifying strengths, resources and processes.
Dream – This stage involves envisioning a possible future without any constraints or considerations of practicality.
Design – This stage involves devising plans to move towards the possible future by leveraging the identified strengths.
Destiny – This stage focuses on making the plan implementable, implementing it and evaluating it.

In order to develop a positive work climate, organizations should employ appreciative inquiry consistently across the organizational hierarchy at individual, group and organizational levels. At an individual level, organizations can support employees through mentoring and coaching to identify their strengths, create action plans for personal development and achieve them. At the team level, organizations can specifically create appreciative inquiry groups to foster mutual respect, inclusiveness and mutual support. At the organizational level, organizations can use appreciative inquiry to develop processes and policies for creating a positive work environment. Thus, by making appreciative inquiry a standard practice to approach issues, organizations can foster the development of positive mental models, which can enhance employee well-being, happiness, and ultimately performance.

Ankita Tandon Member since May 16, 2020

Ankita Tandon is a Fellow (FPM) from Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode in the OB&HR Area and has a master’s degree in psychology from University of Delhi. She was Assistant Professor - Human Resources at FLAME University, Pune. She has received the Best Reviewer Award in the Entrepreneurship & Small Business Track at the 2012 Annual Meeting of Southwest Academy of Management. She has also acted as an invited reviewer for a report published by UNDP Istanbul International Centre for the Private Sector in Development, and for IIM Kozhikode Society and Management Review. Her professional experience has been in the training domain in various reputed organizations.