Hope

HOPE

By-Shubham Bansal

PGP05045

ABSTRACT

Today, a new kind of organisation has emerged. This kind of organisation obviously existed before, but with the importance of human resource management felt by all in a workplace, this kind has the maximum chances of succeeding. this organisation is an emotionally intelligent organisation. A change is seen from the traditional mechanistic organisations to these free, creative, human organisations. Respect and courtesy are a part of these organisations. They are also strategically focused organisation considering workforce as one of the major element. This structure has brought in many HR elements, previously considered not important, but now are heavily researched upon. One of them is hope. Now, managers strive to create a positive organisational behaviour, where both the employees and managers have hope and optimism. In this article, I try to explain how hope can be an important element in a workplace and how can mangers try to build up and sustain hope among the employees.

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope”

Martin Luther King Jr.

Hope is being ready at every moment for that which is not born. (Erich Fromm). Traditional psychologists say that hope is simply a positive state of mind based on expectations of positive outcomes. But now, researchers, in organisational sense, say that hope is not just wishful thinking. It is not just positive prognosis or positive forecast or a conviction that something will turn out well. They want to throw out the element of naive hope or false hope, or just hoping for positives and not working for it. Vaclav Havel says” hope is an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. It is the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. It gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that sometimes seem without hope.”

Poet Emily Dickinson says that hope is a wishy-wishy thing, a nice thing, even a feathered thing, but not a business thing. Some say that business is numbers, calculations, performance, results, things which can be quantified, so hope is not. They say that if a business relies on hope, there is something wrong with it. This is a wrong conceptualization to Shane J. Lopez, a psychologist with major research on hope. To Lopez, hope is an attribute that can be measured, increased, and deployed. And he contends that hope plays a central role in business as it drives persistence, motivation, goal setting, and innovation.