Organizational Psychology books

The focus of this volume is on the role of emotions in organizational governance, which involves the complete gamut of organizational processes and procedures, including the means whereby organizations are controlled and directed. Traditionally organizational governance has been viewed as a largely procedural phenomenon, and therefore immune from the vagaries of human emotion. Nothing could be further from the truth. Organizations are structures built on human capital. As such, their governance is subject to all the vicissitudes and frailties that humans are capable of, including employee mistreatment and harm.

Failure informs more generously and reliably than success. Failure is the best indicator of what’s working and what’s not in any complex system or enterprise. All failures will inevitably reveal latent defects and/or failure modes that are invariably buried within the people, processes, materials, design, manufacturing, and management that comprise the complex system. In this new framework from former NASA aerospace professionals, Newman and Wander employ a unique system failure case study (SFCS) paradigm, originally developed to stimulate systems thinking and lessons learning at NASA, that combines storytelling and systems engineering designed to enhance organizational learning.  The authors employ the SFCS approach to explore a vast array of failure events in multiple sectors of transportation, industry, aerospace, construction, and critical infrastructure. They provide an Integrated Analysis seeking trends, patterns, and universally applicable insights that readers can use to recognize areas of potential vulnerability within their own activities. The authors then identify specific actions within the span of control of enterprise leaders, project managers, process owners and operators which can be implemented to manage risk in high consequence, high risk activities.

The rapidly growing recognition of the importance of emotions in understanding all aspects of organizational life is facilitating the development of focused areas of scholarship. Chapters in this volume are authored by leading and emerging scholars of emotion in organizational settings from around the world and deal with new ways of looking at emotions within the organizational framework.