Personal Growth in Organizations: A Review and Integrative Theoretical Framework

Abstract

Personal growth has interested management scholars for nearly a century, yet research on personal growth has not cohered into a substantive research domain. Nevertheless, various bodies of literature have made important strides in understanding specific elements of personal growth, such as the mindsets that foster such growth (e.g., growth mindset), growth following extreme challenges (e.g., post-traumatic growth), and personal growth within specific roles (e.g., leadership development). While these and other literature streams offer valuable insights about growth, they lack integration, resulting in an incomplete understanding of how employees achieve personal growth at work. To further research on personal growth in organizations, we review 292 articles from six streams of organizational and psychology literature that explore various aspects of personal growth. We provide an integration of the existing literature by developing a clear definition of personal growth, offering an integrative process model of personal growth, identifying opportunities for cross-pollination across growth literatures, and providing a clear agenda for future research on this topic. Our integrative framework responds to the expanding scholarly interest in personal growth and the increasing emphasis that individuals place on it as a crucial element of their working lives.

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