The Role Of Positive Psychology In Teams

By Paul M Smith

In order to be effective team members we all need to be at our best individually before we can be at our best with others. This is reflected in Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The first three habits focus on becoming independent, the next three focus on becoming interdependent, and the last personal renewal. I bring up Covey, who’s definitely old school, because his work is arguably the foundation for today’s personal development industry. Let’s face it, personal development is definitely the place everybody has to start. Also, it’s easier to sell the idea of improving our own performance than it is to get us to put resources into raising the bar for every team member. At Transcendeam, we’re not about taking the path of least resistance because we’ve experienced and are motivated by the synergy effective teams can achieve. So we start with Positive Psychology (+Psych) and “flourishing” which is the foundation for becoming someone who consistently has extraordinary team interactions.

Flourishing

In 1998 Martin Seligman was the President of the American Psychological Association and he coined the phrase “Positive Psychology” to introduce a “scientific study of positive human functioning and flourishing on multiple levels.” He understood that simply curing mental illness didn’t create happiness. He decided there should be an emphasis on figuring out how average people can live extraordinary lives, which he calls “flourishing.” +Psych is not about having an overly positive outlook, but about moving ever closer to optimal “flourishing.”

Because of psychology’s emphasis on curing illness, and the more general Western medical perspective of treating sick individuals, the emphasis in +Psych has primarily been on the individual. How can each individual live the richest, most satisfying, and most productive life available to them? That’s essentially the question +Psych set out to answer and most of the research focuses on what works for individuals. Certainly, there are counter examples in psychology, like industrial psychology, community psychology, and social psychology. Even Seligman himself (along with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) defines +Psych to “include the biological, personal, relational, institutional, cultural, and global dimensions of life.” Nonetheless, the majority of +Psych research and interventions are focused on the individual.

Emerging Science

+Psych is an emerging scientific field even though there were individual researchers who did work along these lines well before Seligman’s focus on +Psych in the late 90s. Among those early researchers was Ed Diener, who did work on Subjective Well-Being, and Corey Key’s, who studied “flourishing.”

Because it is an emerging field, there are many controversies, misunderstandings, and partial results that haven’t been studied enough to know the whole story. There’s a lot of work left to do to determine what will work to create greater well-being in any particular individual. But for all the uncertainty, there’s a lot of evidence that a whole range of techniques can help you flourish. The important thing is to try the ones that have shown promise, scientifically, and see which ones work for you.

In order to understand what techniques you can try, you need to know about how scientists approach +Psych. One of the most widely used descriptions of +Psych is with five elements that make up “the good life”: Positive emotions, Engagement, positive Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment (or Achievement). These five elements are listed this way because they are captured in the acronym PERMA, which we’ll discuss in more detail in future posts. Like so many other things in +Psych, the elements of PERMA were identified by Martin Seligman, who coined the acronym.

Discussion

Please share what’s worked for you to create “the good life.” This is especially relevant if you can connect your personal growth to how you improved your interactions with others on your team(s). It’s even more important if you can show how your personal growth has lead to better outcomes for your team(s).