Virtue Ethics in Positive Organizational Scholarship: An Integrative Perspective

The movement of Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) aims to understand the factors that contribute to a flourishing human condition. Theorists from this group regularly invoke virtue as a foundational concept, using it to anchor the meaning of “positive.” Yet virtue ethicists have raised concerns that this grounding is based in a superficial understanding of virtue. This paper proposes an integrative framework to bridge the two perspectives, connecting the notion of “positive deviance”—popularized in POS—to the idea of virtue as a mean between extremes as understood in the philosophy of virtue ethics.