Collective Flourishing as an Appreciative Process of Organizing: A Team Development Approach

Abstract

Flourishing represents the full potential of a system, serving as a guiding force to build more virtuous, innovative, resilient, and highly effective organizations. It is a desired state for most companies, and there is an increasing interest in knowing how it can be enacted. Unfortunately, most studies have approached it as an ideal condition or end state, which has limited our capacity to explore its dynamic or unfolding nature. I propose to overcome this limitation by exploring the notion of flourishing as an appreciative process of organizing, which I describe as an ongoing set of interactions and narratives that help to perceive and enhance the full potential of social systems. To explore this, I implemented an appreciative team development program in five different teams, with the aim of exploring the organizing and sensemaking processes that allow the emergence of flourishing states. In doing so, I use grounded theory methods to build a process model of positive change in teams, which offers interesting insights as to: (1) understanding flourishing from a process perspective; (2) recognizing the processes that characterize an “appreciative mode” of organizing and sensemaking; and (3) illuminating the micro foundations of positive organization development at the team level.