Positive organizational change does not have to be planned or managed top down in a linear, urgent manner. Rather, it can be "unleashed" or discovered by helping people within organizations to identify their own best experiences in the past, and then use them to imagine, design, and bring into being the organization they most want and which works best. The method is called "Appreciative Inquiry." The volume editors and their panel of experts examine how AI works in practice, and how its many (and often surprising) benefits can be realized in just about any organization. The result is a major explication and source book for HR and organizational development specialists and upper level management trying to lead effective change. Detailed case reports from the field show how this unique approach is actually applied and what its consequences are. Readers will learn to identify the "positive core" of any system--the practices and principles that encourage the best in organizational capacity and performance. They will find not only specific outcomes but also some detailed reflections by practitioners on the use of Appreciative Inquiry. A volume summary lays out the themes and lesson that span the cases. Also presented are powerful and novel propositions on how to approach the crucial issues in organizational change. The result is a major explication and source book for HR and organizational development specialists.

The term organizational advocacy offers a new way to look at the interaction between people and their organizations. What each of us thinks, says, does in the workplace, and the things we appreciate and the things that displease us-- according to organizational advocacy--really matter. Organizational advocacy puts responsibility and accountability for achievement where it should be, not with some distant manager but on us as individuals. Seiling's book is an easily understood tour of this challenging new concept and how it works from the ground up. Seldom has it been made so clear, as Seiling does here, that we and our organizations really are one.

Seiling begins by introducing organizational advocacy and its foundation upon task performance and partnering relationships. Seiling agrees that readers will have questions and concerns, and that barriers to just understanding OA, let alone using it, do exist. She maintains that the activities contributing to or among high performance systems have been ignored in the past. Management simply assumed that the people they hired were automatically contributive and automatically capable of productive relationships. This serious misreading leads to misunderstood expectations of people, disconnection from the organization, and eventually to deteriorated productivity. Seiling summarizes all this in six subsets, making clear that personal responsibility, distributed accountability, and shared leadership are vital to an organization's health and performance. Using cases drawn from some of the nation's most respected companies and public organizations, Seiling makes an important contribution to the practice of human resource management, and to executive understanding of how to make organizations more productive.