Damian Sendler: The field of positive organizational psychology (POP) investigates the positive aspects of achieving peak performance at the workplace. No bibliometric analysis has been done to determine the high-level structure, developments, and distribution of knowledge since the field’s inception, despite the fact that it is well-established and boasts a large number of publications. 7181 articles published in POP on Web of Science Core Collection will be analyzed for this project (WoSCC). A bibliometric analysis and science mapping were carried out in a retrospective manner. Title, authors, institutions and countries, scientific categories, journals and keywords were extracted from WoSCC. citations were also extracted. According to the JCR 2019, the impact factor, quartile, and country were gathered. Crane’s proposal was used to categorize authors, and Bradford’s law was used to calculate the number of authors. According to the findings, it’s a field with more than a century of experience, which has been divided into three levels of increasing productivity and diminishing visibility over the last few years. Psychology and business and economics are particularly popular in countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands because of their cross-disciplinary nature and global reach. Well-being at work, positive leadership, work engagement, and psychological capital emerged as the most popular study topics.
Damian Jacob Sendler: According to Martin Seligman, president of the American Association of Psychology in 1998, the scientific study of optimal human functioning is called positive psychology (PP). Over the course of a decade later, Linley [1] et al. [2] looked at a variety of PP referent definitions and combined them into the following: Aiming to theoretically reorient and restructure psychological research and practice by giving greater weight to the study of positive aspects of human life experiences and integrating them with those that cause suffering and pain, the scientific study of the possibilities for optimal human development at the meta-psychological level (p. 8).
Dr. Sendler: It is important to note that positive psychology (PP) shifts the focus away from focusing on the problems people face and toward focusing on the strengths and psychological resources that they already possess in order to help them reach their full potential. Accordingly, the majority of PP’s study topics revolve around enhancing one’s subjective well-being (happiness), enhancing one’s positive mood and emotions (including gratitude), enhancing one’s sensory and intellectual pleasures (including art), and enhancing one’s virtues (such as optimism and physical exercise).
In psychology and other fields of education and training, this way of thinking has quickly spread [3,4]. The International Positive Psychology Association was founded in the United States in 2007 and the first World Congress of Positive Psychology was held in Philadelphia in 2013. After the 6th European Congress of Positive Psychology in Moscow in June of 2012, the European Society of Positive Psychology was born.
In this context, positive organizational psychology emerges, which aims to focus on the positive aspects of optimal workplace functioning. Individual and group optimal functioning, effective management of psychosocial well-being, and organizational development to improve health [5] are defined by Salanova and her team. This viewpoint has led a significant number of researchers to shift their focus from focusing on the negative aspects of organizations (such as employee burnout, stress, and organizational deficiencies) to focusing on the positive aspects (such as euphoria, change management, and the development of strengths and psychological capacities for improving professional performance) [3,6,7]. POP’s definition and focus are still a source of contention among scientists [8]. The term positive psychology at work has been used, as well as terms like “positive workplace” and “positive or healthy organizations.”
Many studies have been conducted in the last few decades on the constructs of PP as they relate to organizations. The literature contains a wide range of reviews, from broad areas such as PP [10], well-being at work [11], and organizational psychology [12], to more specific ones such as ethical leadership, happiness management, happy–productive workers, or the relationship between job crafting and healthy organizations [16].
As aforementioned review studies provide important information about how PP is being studied in POP, they do not provide an overall picture of this scientific field’s development. As well as lacking a comprehensive overview of this field’s impact on journals, institutions, authors, and historical trends, they fail to point to the most important topics or provide any indication of their importance. Therefore, this paper aims to fill this void, so that researchers can gain a better understanding of this scientific field’s developments and knowledge distribution. A bibliometric analysis and mapping review are appropriate tools for this purpose. These methods look at how science works and how it is structured [18]. A better understanding of the POP’s current research status will allow experts and scholars interested in it to propose new research.
Bibliometric analysis was used to examine the development of POP, including the distribution of publications and citations, as well as scientific categories, and the most relevant journals and the most cited papers in this field were also reported in this study. Visualization of collaborative co-authors, research institution networks, and co-occurrences of keywords using VOSviewer were also used.
Sections one through three of this paper are as follows: The study’s design and data source are discussed in detail in Section 2, as are the bibliometric analysis methods and the software used for visual data analysis. On the third page of this report, you’ll find an overview that includes a chronology of results, an analysis of the most frequently cited papers in the last 15 years and keyword co-occurrence analysis, as well as information on scientific categories, geographical distributions of countries, institutions and collaboration networks, and a look at the collaborative co-author network. To summarize the discussion, the final section, Section 5, includes conclusions and limitations.
It was the goal of this study to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the development of POP research publications. Analysis of scientific categories, publication and citation trends, top players in terms of journals and institutions, collaborative networks between authors and countries, and central research topics were conducted using bibliometric methodology and science mapping.
Over the years, the study of POPs has evolved into an interdisciplinary field that revolves around two main areas of study. More than 700 articles were published between 1904 and 1994, with an irregular frequency of publication; between 1995 and 2007, there was a gradual rise in the frequency of publication; and from 2008 to the present, there has been an exponential increase in the frequency. Study by Sott et al. [12] examined 100 years of scientific progress in the field of work and organizational psychology and found a similar trend. This is the third stage in which interest in a proactive and positive approach to the study of organizations has become more consolidated, as indicated by Luthans [7], which focuses more on strengths than on flaws, i.e. on what is right in organizations, teams, leaders, and employees. Professionals and academics in the management and organizational psychology fields have taken notice of the current PP, which began in the 2000s, as a result.
Damian Sendler
By analyzing the journals and scientific areas, this study confirms this. “Psychology” and “Business and Economics” have contributed 43.54% of all POP works since its inception, despite the fact that POP is a multidisciplinary field that has changed over the course of its history. As Bradford [21] points out, 13 of the 20 variables that make up the core zone fall into one of these two categories. Both the organizational and work aspects, as well as the psychological aspects, are included in the definition of POP [6].
Damian Jacob Markiewicz Sendler: Automation has arrived and will have an impact on the employment landscape, but the most important point is that automation brings data with it, and it would be foolish for us to ignore this new source of data. People’s insights and new ways of collaborating across an organization can be gained through the use of digital technologies, which can also help resolve challenges and issues that had previously been overlooked [51]. Researchers and academics need new technologies to improve their ability to predict organizational behavior with greater precision.
For the past few years, the number of citations given to papers in the field of POP has grown exponentially, but this growth has not been accompanied by an increase in the number of citations given to these papers. According to the citation analysis, the number of citations has steadily increased over the first two years of publication. It’s an objective measure of an investigation’s performance, value, recognition, influence, and impact. There was no parallel increase in the number of citations in the third period, however, with the exponential growth. In 2012, there were 34.26 citations per work; in 2020, there will be 1.19 citations per work.
Citing a source for a variety of reasons is common, as Garfield pointed out in 1977 [53]. As a starting point, these might include providing an overview of the topic or identifying an original publication that describes concepts or discusses related ideas. As a result, we believe that further investigation into the evolution of these works in the POP area as of 2012 is necessary to understand why citations have decreased and new works have been produced.
The oldest works are more likely to be cited, but there is evidence both for and against this [54]. For the record, it appears that papers published in the last 15 years are less likely to be considered the best in their field of study [55]. These two aspects are confirmed in the case of POP. This period between 2001 and 2011 has produced many classics, those papers that have sparked interest among researchers. As evidence, the most cited articles each year (apart from four) have received more than 400 citations, with the most citations going to “The measurement of work engagement with a short questionnaire—A cross-national study” [36] and “Positive psychological capital: Measurement and relationship with performance and satisfaction” [37] by Luthans and collaborators receiving 1220 citations. Both of these articles are highlighted below. As a result, we might speculate that POP’s frontier of knowledge lies in this final stage. Core knowledge and frontier knowledge can be distinguished in scientific progress, as Cole pointed out [56,57]. The foundational theories of a field are found in the core, whereas the more ephemeral frontier knowledge has been developed in recent years and includes descriptive analyses with little transcendence of time. Those who conduct research in the field of POP need to make their findings known to their peers in the field.
Damian Jacob Sendler
With more than 1000 institutions from 123 countries on five continents, the analysis of data shows that in each of the three time periods studied, United States, UK, and Netherlands contributed the most publications as well as received the most citations. Along with Australia, China, and Spain, they also have the most international collaboration.
It is also the United States that has a larger collaborative network with countries like China, the United Kingdom and Australia. Many researchers from other countries are interested in establishing research links because of its high economic capacity and research institutions [58]. Fred Luthans from Nebraska and James B. Avey from Central Washington University stand out among its authors as clear leaders in POP since its inception.
Arnold B. Bakker of Erasmus University Rotterdam and Wilmar Schaufeli of Utrecht University lead notable teams from the Netherlands. Despite its productivity, the United Kingdom does not have a notable team in this area. China’s scientific productivity and network are impressive, but it has not been accompanied by high visibility. Citations to Chinese research are extremely low. Because of this, China may need to rethink its research evaluation standards and focus on improving the quality of its research, as Zhu and Liu [59] suggest. Increasing international collaboration between countries and research groups to consolidate POP would be interesting to the scientific community.
Damien Sendler: Co-occurrence analysis results showed that keywords were distributed across four POP themes, as well as highlighting the most popular topics. According to Soot et al. [12], these are new themes in the development of work and organizational psychology, which is in line with what they found. Individual, organizational, and social productivity are all considered to be highly dependent on well-being at work, which is defined as “the quality of life at work” (or “QOL”) [60]. According to a recent study, well-being at work is important because it can lead to positive outcomes like happiness and life satisfaction as well as negative ones like stress and depression when it’s not met [61]. Additionally, research on instruments for evaluation and intervention in this field is important.
Authentic leadership, transformational leadership, and ethical leadership are all terms in the “positive leadership” cluster. For example, these studies show that there are many benefits to positive leadership in terms of positive organizational behaviors (e.g. better management), improved performance (e.g. increased job satisfaction), or organizational commitment (among others).
Third, the job demands–resources model [62] and the concept of burnout [63] are central to the study of work engagement, with terms such as burnout, resources, job resources, demands, and demands–resources model appearing frequently. Finally, there’s the study of psychological capital. ‘ When referring to a positive psychological state associated with self-efficacy when undertaking and making the necessary efforts to succeed at tasks of some difficulty, optimism about current and future success, hope of success and perseverance in achieving the goals, and resilience to achieve success despite problems and adversity are all included in this cluster according to the definition of Luthans, Avey, Avolio, Norman and Combs [64]. POP forecasting may be headed in an interesting direction in the future if new research topics, approaches, and methodologies are combined and determined to yield more meaningful results.
There haven’t been any reviews or in-depth scientometrics analyses of POP in the last few years. Using bibliometrics and science mapping, this study examines the development of POP research since its inception.
The findings of this study can be summarized as follows using the bibliometrics analysis: The number of publications and citations in this field increased until 2011, when a significant decline in the number of citations began; (3) although it has had a multidisciplinary approach since its inception, psychology has been particularly interested in this area since 1904, when it developed around three time periods, consolidating this positive approach to the study of organizations by 2008.
As a result, there are some limitations to this investigation. Due to the fact that other databases such as Scopus or Google Scholar were not consulted during the research process, the number and type of works found, as well as the number of citations, are all dependent on the WoSCC. More than 21,100 peer-reviewed journals, books, and conference proceedings published worldwide since 1800 can be accessed through the WoSCC, despite the fact that it does not include all of the peer-reviewed publications. Due to the search profile used, it is possible that some important articles that have had a significant impact on POP have not been included in this work despite the extensiveness of the search. We also acknowledge the limitation of not taking into account self-citations, or whether the citations received by the works are positive or negative, so that the level of agreement or criticism of the scientific community towards the cited articles cannot be determined [65].
