On Work and Well-Being: A Conversation With Jane Dutton, PhD
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Whether your 9-to-5 takes up only 8 hours of your day or your work seeps into many areas of your life, whether you work for yourself or for a major organization, we suspect most would agree that finding well-being in the workplace is an essential component of living a good life. But it isn’t as easy as showing up every day with a smile or deciding to be satisfied with what your job entails. Workplace well-being gets down to the foundation of what we are seeking with our work, who we are working with, what the organizations we work for prioritize, and the context of our lives outside of working hours.
In this issue of MAPP Magazine, we’ve explored multiple dimensions of work and well-being, including having vs. being, scaling corporate well-being, entrepreneurial well-being, and mitigating guilt in working mothers. To conclude this power-packed issue, we’re thrilled to share excerpts from our recent conversation with positive organizational scholar, Jane Dutton.
Jane E. Dutton, Ph.D., is a researcher and professor at the University of Michigan. She co-founded the University of Michigan’s Center for Positive Organizations at the Ross School of Business, the epicenter of Positive Organizational Scholarship. Her research and teaching has focused on compassion at work, high-quality connections, positive identities, and their roles in human flourishing. She has written over 100 journal articles and 13 books, including Awakening Compassion at Work: The Quiet Power that Elevates Individuals and Organizations and Energize Your Workplace. In this interview, we spoke with Dr. Dutton about the state of work and key contributors to flourishing organizations.
MAPP Magazine (MM): Can you share a bit about your background and how you came to the topic of work, positive organizations, and well-being?
Jane Dutton (JD): I'm an organizational researcher at heart. How I came to the positive organizational space is a windy story, not a direct line at all. But when I think of it, it was really two pivotal events that made a huge difference. One, I was asked to the first conference in Mexico that [Martin Seligman] had when he was bringing together positive psychologists. Amy Wrzesniewski, a student of mine, was appointed to develop a positive work pod, and she invited me and Monica Worline, another student of mine at the time.
I went without expecting anything really other than it would be fun, and I remember being blown away. I remember listening to Barb Frederickson and Chris Peterson and thinking, oh my God, this is so relevant to organizations—thinking that if we could understand how to build in the conditions in organizations that would activate some of these psychological processes that built human capability and capacity as well as it contributed to people's well-being, that we could really make a difference.
When I'm enthusiastic about something, I'm pretty irrepressible. So, as soon as I got back, we arranged a lunch with Barb and Chris and Kim Cameron and Bob Quinn, who were my colleagues at Michigan. After the event in Mexico and having a chance to work with Monica and Amy, I came back going, oh, we’ve got to get a gathering together of organizational scholars. And so, in the summer, Barb, Chris, Bob, Kim, and I set this up for November of 2001.
The second pivotal event was 9/11. After 9/11, we were sort of all called to [ask], what can we contribute at this point in time to understand how to help leaders who are really struggling with not just suffering but major crises and disruption everywhere? We asked all the people who were coming to the conference to write a memo to leaders, and we created a website called Leading in Trying Times by October.
Now, at that time, 2001, that was radical. But we got tons of feedback about how useful the website was for leaders. And so that really emboldened us and fundamentally changed the design of our conference such that we got money from the provost at the University of Michigan to go document cases of positive organizing in New York. So I went to Reuters, and people went to other organizations around New York to try to document real-time positive organizing or how organizations in the face of crisis were doing things that were actually fostering, I wouldn't say well-being, but human confidence and courage and all the things that we might identify as good human conditions in a time of crisis.
These two events were pivotal. At that conference, we had a lot of doctoral students there, and we emboldened them to write proposals for a symposium that we then presented at the Academy of Management. They all got in, and whoosh, what would normally take years in terms of getting an idea or perspective into the attentional field of our field [took a much shorter amount of time]. That's how the center was created at the University of Michigan. This conference helped to identify that there were a lot of researchers and a lot of doctoral students who were fundamentally interested in these ideas.
The Center for Positive Organizations at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan has been a central hub in the Positive Organizational Scholarship effort. The fact that we had eight tenured faculty members who were interested in this really helped to make it a fertile ground for generating ideas. At the same time, I had been doing work on compassion with a group of people, including Monica Worline, at the Compassion Lab. And I was working with Amy, who was my doctoral student, and another doctoral student, Laura Morgan Roberts, who was studying how you can help people create affirmative identities. It was a confluence of different factors that propelled a bunch of us to really take up the ideas and promise of Positive Organizational Scholarship.
I consider myself one of the midwives of this effort, and I think I had a particular lens because I'd been a strategy researcher. What a strategy researcher is interested in is an organization's distinctive competencies that allow it to be successful over time. And what the Positive Organizational Scholarship and well-being lenses brought to the conversation in the strategy field is how do you build organizational strengths, not just compassion, but courage? How do you create organizations that reproduce sustainable courage at the collective level? How do you create organizations where integrity is a property of the whole? Positive Organizational Scholarship expanded the ideas about what organizational strengths matter to human beings. It argued that strengths that are good for the individual are also something valuable at the collective level.
And I've never looked back. I'm even more passionate now than I was then about what a positive organizational lens can bring to our understanding and to our practice, as I am not convinced that changing one person at a time is fast enough to deal with our world’s pressing issues. And I'm really afraid with the grand challenges that are facing our world, we have to understand scalable resourcing dynamics—or what we might call generative dynamics—things that unleash human-based resources like optimism, care or compassion, generosity, gratitude, all these things that positive psychologists study, but positive psychologists don’t yet address how to scale these processes at the collective level. That's where I think an organizational lens can be particularly illuminating.
MM: Thank you for that, Jane. With this lens of the organizational perspective and how we need to affect on a more scalable level, we would love to hear you comment on the state of work. You expressed some concerns about things that are happening. We’re wondering what you think about things like scores of people leaving the workplace and people not necessarily sharing that optimism.
JD: The state of organizations is different from the state of work. I think of those as distinctive. But I actually am quite optimistic about work, even though I'm not quite as optimistic about organizations. I think people leaving organizations can be a good thing. I think the fact that the labor markets continue to be pretty good and that people can move is a good thing. I think when you have talent leaving, it forces organizations to be better at keeping the talent. And I'm really quite optimistic about distributed work and the fact that technologies are allowing us to do so much of our work anywhere. I think that's a really good thing. I think these technological developments that allow, especially women, more flexibility are good developments. I also think AI is a good development. I'm choosing to be much more of an optimist about AI and the fact that it's revaluing human-based skills as the things that can't be replicated by AI. And again, we're going to have a lot of disruption and a lot of adjustment in that thing in the short term. But I think ultimately [AI] may bring [forward] the forms of work that are actually really important so that they're potentially more valued. I hope that's the case. The younger generation is leaving work because they’re just not putting up with a lot of the stuff that older generations put up with.
I think the rise in unions is a really good thing. The stronger the voice of the worker inside organizations, the better. Sometimes it takes people leaving, and sometimes it means collective action like unions. I am really excited about how technology is enabling entrepreneurship all over the place. I mean, the fact that poverty levels are going down globally, partly because people have access to phones. For example, phones are actually enabling women who have been impoverished to start businesses around the globe. I actually think [what’s happening in the workplace and the future of work is] quite promising.
MM: Awesome. You spoke of a distinction between the state of organizations and the state of work. Do you have that same optimism about the state of organizations?
JD: I will choose to say yes, partly because I think there's more and more pressure for organizations to be transparent about a lot of things that were usually hidden. And I think the more that they're in the light, the better. I think the fact that organizations are going to be more accountable in the longer run around diversity and equity and all of that, I think that's a really good thing.
I know there's a lot of abuse and toxicity in organizations and that organizations create, which is one of the reasons compassion is so important. It's not just pain that's coming in from people's lives into the workplace, but organizations, by their very nature, create pain. And unless you have a capability for healing, that pain sits. It continues, and it festers, and it does major harm to organizations. The more we can shine a light on organizations that are doing good and doing well, the more Glassdoor and other kinds of metrics make it more visible to people about what it's really like inside this organization, I think that is all good. That's all putting pressure on the average. I hope to make organizations better. I have to be hopeful.
MM: Can you share more about what compassion looks like in practice and why it’s important in organizations?
JD: As you know, I care a ton about this. Compassion is a healing force. It's what we're born to do. We're born exquisitely to be sensitive to others' pain and to respond in some way to try to alleviate that pain. What happens is, in some systems, that basic instinct is shut down. Sometimes it is shut down because it is behavior that is not seen as rigorous, but instead is seen as soft. It gets gendered very quickly in a lot of organizations.
And yet, suffering is everywhere. It's part of the human condition. If we can be in systems where, again, we think of compassion as a process, not just as an emotion, where people notice pain, where they interpret it generously, where they feel empathic concern, and there's some move to really alleviate that pain, then that system is going to have people who heal more quickly.
Leadership matters, and how [compassion] is modeled at the top is incredibly important, but that is not the whole story. Compassion can be built into the way roles are defined. For example, how many students have I taught in my 40 years of teaching? A lot. Never in my role as a professor was being compassionate part of my role expectation. Never was I given any training on being compassionate. In some organizations, the roles are defined in ways that really call forth people's compassion. There was a bus company that defined bus drivers as major compassion providers. Their job was to listen to passengers, to pick up on cues and to just give a little bit of care to people who seemed to need it when they got on the bus. Or Candace Billups, the hospital cleaner. Candace and a whole bunch of other hospital cleaners defined their role as cleaner as a healer. The organization wasn't defining it that way; she was defining it that way.
Organizations that are compassionate often have roles where compassion is defined as part of the role, so it legitimates and encourages it. Or if spontaneously roles arise that have compassion at the core and the organization actually recognizes that role, that's another way that compassion becomes part of the whole.
Usually, the leaders matter, the roles matter, the spontaneous or what we would call emergent roles as well as designated roles [matter]. Do they include compassion and noticing suffering? Also, routines, which are just repeated activities in organizations, matter a lot.
In this Midwest billing department that we studied in Jackson, Michigan, they were identified as the most compassionate unit in the hospital. This is a really hard job. You're paid minimum wage. You're basically on the phone trying to collect money all the time. And it was, I think, a 30-person unit with a 20-person waiting list for people who wanted to work in the billing department because it was just a beautifully compassionate growing field for people. And so we went in to study it to try to figure out what they were doing. And they had this whole repertoire of routines that meant they were capable of noticing suffering and interpreting and responding to suffering as a normal part of their way of functioning. For example, when they'd be running a meeting, if someone was overloaded with work, the person would bring in the papers that they were working on, and they would just distribute the papers to open envelopes and do the work together as they were doing the meeting. It was this very natural way of using meeting time of collectively being together as a way to honor the fact that people's loads were variable and you could help each other out so that you minimized burnout. Also, the way they onboarded people, they were explicitly looking for stories that showed how caring and compassionate they were when they talked to them. That's an example of a routine.
There are ways to build in compassion in how you onboard people, how you offboard people or let people go, how you run meetings, how you have one-on-one developmental meetings. Any of these repeated activities can be infused with compassion.
So, the answer to your question, it's not that there's a single profile of what an organization looks like when it's compassionate. But if it's compassionate at the organizational level, it has to be scalable and repeatable. It’s often scalable and repeatable because it's built into the roles, built into the routines, or built into the culture, or the leaders are constantly communicating it. When you have a really compassionate organization, all of those things are working together.
MM: When I think of an organization, I don't necessarily think of an organization in the ways you’re describing. I don't think of work in that way. There's kind of a disconnect where I'm like, oh, there are organizations out there that are actually doing this? This is incredible to me. I was just thinking about experiences I've had in workplaces where this wasn’t my experience. I can understand on an individual level why compassion matters. I can understand on a relational level, and I think I can guess why it matters on an organizational level. Can you speak about why business leaders should care about compassion in their organizations? Or, said differently, what’s the business case for organizational compassion?
JD: There's the moral reason for it. There are multiple studies that show that organizations financially are better off if they are—like Kim Cameron would say—virtuous. And part of his measure of [virtuousness] has compassion and support. Raj Sisodia has a book called Firms of Endearment where he does this 10-year study of organizations. It shows that organizations that show markers of caring are actually more profitable. Compassion contributes to a lot of good things for people—they're more resilient, they feel more valued, they have increased commitment, [and] they have faster physical [and] psychological recovery.
It’s not just the sufferers who benefit from compassion. The compassion providers also gain. Being compassionate changes people’s sense of self worth and strengthens their commitment to the organization. They feel a stronger connection to the people that they're helping. And then people who are witnessing or watching compassion on an everyday basis, it increases their pride in the organizations. They become more prosocial or more motivated to act for the common good. And in the words of Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, they become more morally elevated, which produces all kinds of good things. The business cases [could be] based on increased profitability, on increased quality of product or service.
If you are in an organization that's not compassionate, and you are suffering, you cannot have as much attention or capacity to do as good of work as if you're in an organization where, again, you are more resilient and heal more quickly because your suffering is noticed and responded to in a loving way. Compassionate organizations have an easier time retaining their employees. Compassionate organizations foster more positive relationships between people, which allows organizations to coordinate better. It allows them to collaborate better. People are more engaged, and there's better learning.
Amy Edmundson talks about psychological safety, and there's research that shows that compassion creates greater levels of psychological safety. Psychological safety is the number one predictor of the effectiveness of teams. Organizations function, the teams in an organization function better when the organization is compassionate. So, there is a huge case for this. And to be honest, I don't understand why all organizations don't aspire [to it].
MM: Wow, that's so exciting to hear and definitely makes me optimistic. How do you think organizations that have strengths like compassion built in contribute to collective well-being and set us up to confront these big issues that the world is facing right now?
JD: I think that it facilitates people being in a state of optimal functioning in the sense that Barb Frederickson talks about defining flourishing. In a state of optimal functioning, you not only have the resources to be more effective, but you are infecting other people to be more effective. So there's this cascading of increased capability for effective action. It just means at all levels, people are more capable of effective action, not because they are becoming more skilled, but because they're learning better. They're better able to learn, but they're also braver. They also are more caring. You've probably seen this—there are just moments of exquisite excellence when a group of people functions like this. It's very hard to sustain, but when it happens, it's magic.
Okay, I can't help it. I'm from Michigan. I have to go to football. And we won the national college football championship, and I have listened to every possible tape. I'm so enamored by this team, partly because they're performing way above their grade. We have fewer five-star [players] than other teams, but the guys talk about loving each other at such a level. I mean, it's all for the team, and they just perform at such a level. If they could give off light, we could measure the light that they're giving off. It wasn't just about winning. It was being part of something that was just really effective human goodness—gorgeous.
So well-being, it sort of depends on how you define well-being. As an organizational scholar, well-being seems too static. It is an optimal human psychological state, but the question is, how do you get from that state to doing good and doing well? As an organizational scholar, I'm really interested in the doing and the collective doing because organizations bring people together to get work done that people can't do alone. The more we can help organizations do that better, without burning out people, but actually lifting them up, that’s just such a worthy goal.
MM: Is there anything that we didn't ask about that we shouldn't have asked about? What are we missing? Is there anything else that you want us share?
JD: I think we need to understand organizational strengths beyond compassion. Compassion is just one example of a collective capability. I like the language of capability because, again, it has this orientation of getting stuff done. How can we build organizations that are courageous? How can we build organizations that are high in integrity, that are wise? We tend to look at character strengths at the individual level, which are linked to virtues. I think you could apply that to the collective level.
I just hope more organizational scholars choose to study this and try to understand it. I think it's really important now. I think DEI is an attempt to try to think about how you can, at the organizational level, build in justice as a quality of the whole that is reproduced, that's, again, beyond just values and beliefs. It gets into the nuts and bolts of how you get stuff done in organizations that reproduce justice at the individual and the team level, as well as at the organizational level.
I also think trying to understand resourcing dynamics is really important—resourcing as a verb, not as a noun. How can we think about processes of positive meaning construction or positive emotion generating that are resourcing people and groups to do various things? I think there's a lot we could understand about resourcing dynamics.
MM: For people that aren't familiar, how can you readers learn more about your work?
JD: I have a really good website. If you go to my University of Michigan website, there's a link to a personal website, which is really great. I can't take any credit for it. The staff did a beautiful job, and you can download everything, all my articles, but also media stuff and podcasts and all that stuff.
MM: Thank you, Jane.
About the expert | Jane E. Dutton, Ph.D., is a researcher and professor at the University of Michigan. She co-founded the University of Michigan’s Center for Positive Organizations at the Ross School of Business, the epicenter of Positive Organizational Scholarship. Her research and teaching has focused on compassion at work, high quality connections, positive identities, and their roles in human flourishing. She has written over 100 journal articles and 13 books, including Awakening Compassion at Work: The Quiet Power that Elevates Individuals and Organizations and Energize Your Workplace. In this interview, we spoke with Dr. Dutton about the current state of work and what contributes to flourishing organizations and people.
