©2005 INFORMS A Socially Embedded Model of Thriving at Work

Thriving describes an individual’s experience of vitality and learning. The primary goal of this paper is to develop amodel that illuminates the social embeddedness of employees ’ thriving at work. First, we explain why thriving is a useful theoretical construct, define thriving, and compare it to related constructs, including resilience, flourishing, subjective well-being, flow, and self-actualization. Second, we describe how work contexts facilitate agentic work behaviors, which in turn produce resources in the doing of work and serve as the engine of thriving. Third, we describe how thriving serves as a gauge to facilitate self-adaptation at work. We conclude by highlighting key theoretical contributions of the model and suggesting directions for future research. Key words: thriving; energy; learning; positive growth; resources Employees vary in the degree to which they languish or thrive at work. Whereas languishing captures the sub-jective experience of being stuck, caught in rut, or fail-ing to make progress (Keyes 2002), thriving captures the opposite. When people are thriving, they feel progress and momentum, marked both by a sense of learning (greater understanding and knowledge) and a sense of vitality (aliveness)