An exploration on the application of Appreciative Inquiry through case study

Appreciative Inquiry(AI) is an organizational transformation intervention that focuses on
learning from past and current successes as opposed to focusing on deficits and problems.
The Appreciative Inquiry is a process that can move people and their organizations upward
on the ladder of success in today’s competitive global environment of business. Despite
increasing interest in the Appreciative Inquiry, it is very hard to find studies that combine
various results or effects of the Appreciative Inquiry intervention with holistic approach.
This study tried to explore 18 documents bases field experiences to propose an Appreciative
Inquiry’s effectiveness framework by categorizing the results to identify what impact AI
intervention had, what achievement one can expect from AI practice, and how it had
contributed to the organizational performance. We performed this research by applying the
‘Qualitative meta-synthesis’ method to meta-analysis of case studies. The goals of
Qualitative meta-synthesis are theory development, higher level abstraction, and
generalizability in order to make qualitative findings more accessible for application in
practice. From the 18 case studies, we have finally extracted total 9 effectiveness categories
of Appreciative Inquiry - ‘Building cooperative relationships between participants’,
‘Clarification of organization value and mission’, ‘Self-awareness through self-reflection’,
‘Activate participation of various organizations’, ‘Common ideal and setting vision’, ‘New
perspective and knowledge sharing’, ‘Gaining positive energy to change’, ‘Building creative
ideas and knowledge to change’, and ‘Settling Voluntary involvement to change’.