Play is manifested in organizational behavior as a form of engagement with work tasks and as a form of diversion from them. In this paper we examine both manifestations of play as sources of creativity. We argue that when play is a form of engagement with an individual's organizational tasks it facilitates the cognitive, affective, and motivational dimensions of the creative process, while when play...

Virtuousness in organizations involves individuals and teams being resilient, or bouncing back from setbacks in ways that allow them to adapt and grow. In two studies, we focus on emotional carrying capacity (ECC), wherein relationship partners express more of their emotions, express both positive and negative emotions, and do so constructively, as a source of resilience in individuals and in teams. Study 1’s findings indicate...

Organizational learning is an important means for improving performance. Learning is a process, that is, often relational in the sense of relying on interactions between people to determine what needs improving and how to do it. This study addresses the question of how the quality of work relationships facilitates learning behaviours in organizations through the ways it contributes to psychological safety. Data collected from 212...

Social interaction is a central feature of people's life and engages a variety of cognitive resources. Thus, social interaction should facilitate general cognitive functioning. Previous studies suggest such a link, but they used special populations (e.g., elderly with cognitive impairment), measured social interaction indirectly (e.g., via marital status), and only assessed effects of extended interaction in correlational designs. Here the relation between mental functioning and...

Human physiological systems are highly responsive to positive social interactions, but the organizational importance of this finding largely has been unexplored. After reviewing extant research, we illustrate how consideration of the physiology of positive social interactions at work opens new research questions about how positive social interactions affect human capacity and how organizational contexts affect employee health and physiological resourcefulness. We also address the practical...

Marital quality is a major contributor to happiness and health. Unfortunately, marital quality normatively declines over time. We tested whether a novel 21-min intervention designed to foster the reappraisal of marital conflicts could preserve marital quality in a sample of 120 couples enrolled in an intensive 2-year study. Half of the couples were randomly assigned to receive the reappraisal intervention in Year 2 (following no...

A new observational coding system was designed to study how newlywed couples naturally attempt to repair negativity during marital conflict. The patterns of both attack during conflict and repair over time were examined. Criteria for the effectiveness of repair attempts were (1) reducing negative affect or (2) increasing positive affect during conflict. The data on repair and affect were summarized across the entire interaction, and...

The identity literature suggests that the stigma of “dirty work” threatens the ability of occupational members to construct an esteem-enhancing social identity. However, research indicates much the opposite, creating a puzzle we attempt to answer. We argue that the stigma of dirty work fosters development of a strong occupational or workgroup culture, which fosters (1) ideological reframing, recalibrating, and refocusing and (2) selective social comparisons...

This study attempted to determine whether humor production moderates mood and physiological responses to stress of subjects high and low in trait humor. Forty subjects who were high and 40 subjects who were low in trait humor were selected. Half of each group was randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In one condition they generated a humorous monologue and in the other condition they...

This paper investigates the predictability of divorce in a long‐term, prospective longitudinal study. Past research has indicated that 2 periods can be considered the most critical for the survival of marriages: (a) the first 7 years of marriage, during which half of all divorces are known to occur, and (b) the period during which the first child reaches 14 years of age, which has been...