As this study focuses on an organizational intervention, I will in this chapter specify how interventions have been applied in organizations by presenting ways of changing behavior in the workplace. I will describe common change initiatives and the concept of organizational development.
In today’s fast-paced world of technological innovations, evolving customer needs, and changing global economy, organizations need to continuously adopt and change to be able to stay profitable and competitive in the market. This means that employees in organizations
9 constantly are exposed to change initiatives. (Onyeneke & Abe, 2021; Kern & Zapf, 2021) These change initiatives are most often referred to as organizational development.
Huffington, Brunning, and Cole (1997) define organizational development as planned organization-wide change processes targeting, e.g., the structure of how work is organized, the company strategy and direction, the ways of working, the culture or overall climate in the organization. In many cases, the goal is to change people’s behavior concerning
communication, teamwork, decision-making, problem-solving, or leadership. Anderson (2017) further adds that organizational development aims at increasing the effectiveness of the organization and that these initiatives are executed by using interventions to facilitate both personal and organizational change. The interventions should according to Anderson (2017) be based on social and behavioral science knowledge.
There are many types of organizational development interventions. Cummings and Worley (2009) identify four main categories of interventions: human process interventions,
technostructural interventions, Human Resource Management interventions, and strategic change interventions. Human process interventions focus on social processes within the organization and include change programs related to interpersonal relations, group and organizational dynamics. Technostructural interventions refer to change programs helping organizations restructure themselves as well as better integrating people and technology.
These types of interventions include employee involvement programs and work re-design programs including job enrichment programs. (Cummings & Worley, 2009)
Human Resource Management interventions focus on developing, integrating, and supporting individuals in organizations and include programs focusing on performance management, developing talent, managing workforce diversity as well as health and wellness. Finally, strategic change interventions refer to interventions that aim to transform and align an organization's strategy and design with its external environment, to keep up with changing conditions. Interventions in this category include strategic change interventions (e.g.,
organizational re-design or culture change initiatives), and trans-organizational interventions (e.g., mergers or acquisitions). (Cummings & Worley, 2009)
Interventions in the workplace mainly focus on changing the way work is organized, designed, or managed to achieve the intended outcomes (von Thiele Schwarz, Nielsen, Edwards, et al., 2021) More concretely the before mentioned efforts include changing task
10 characteristics e.g., making the task more challenging or interesting, changing work
conditions e.g., reducing workload or improving ergonomics and improving social relations e.g. increasing social support or boosting leadership (Semmer, 2007).
Maybe the two most common organizational interventions include job redesign interventions (e.g., Holman & Axtell, 2016) and participatory occupational health interventions (e.g., Framke & Sørensen, 2015). Job redesign interventions are initiatives that modify job characteristics to impact the feelings, behaviors, and attitudes of employees, in hopes of improving employee outcomes like well-being and performance (Holman & Axtell, 2016).
Participatory occupational health interventions are used to combat unhealthy psychosocial working conditions by improving and changing the work environment (Abildgaard, Hasson, von Thiele Schwarz, et al., 2020). As the name suggests both employees and line managers participate in designing the intervention. Together they analyze the problems and challenges causing negative outcomes, and jointly develop and implement initiatives to help solve them.
The core idea in participatory occupational health interventions is that employees play an important role in designing the intervention and should therefore not only be treated as passive recipients. (Nielsen, 2013)
In the organizational intervention field, the focus in the past has been on individual-level interventions targeting individual factors like attitudes and affect, while the trend more recently has been turning to focus on organizational-level interventions targeting changes in the environment as a way of achieving behavior change (Semmer, 2007). This change in focus has its roots in the belief that changing the environment may generate better outcomes in terms of health than what the individual-level interventions can, but scientifically proving this has been rather vague and inconsistent (Montano, Hoven & Siegrist, 2014; Semmer, 2007). On the other hand, several meta-analyses are showing compelling effects of
individual-level interventions (see e.g., physical activity by Conn, Hafdahl, Cooper, et al., 2009; depression and anxiety symptoms by Martin, Sanderson & Cocker, 2009; stress management by Richardson & Rothstein, 2008).
Tafvelin, von Thiele Schwarz, Nielsen et al. (2019) recognize that employees and managers play an important role in determining how and why interventions work and they, therefore, recommend understanding how they perceive and appraise the intervention to be able to design successful interventions. Even though the intervention in this study focuses on the
11 intrapersonal level, meaning that it targets individual persons, it has features of an
organizational-level intervention, namely targeting changes in the environment. The
intervention is trying to contribute to a change in the organizational culture, by changing the psychosocial environment for its employees. This study will, therefore, at least partly, contribute to the field of organizational-level interventions by investigating how the participants of an intervention perceive it, as recommended by Tafvelin et al. (2019).
Trust and empowerment are concepts that have been used to change behavior in
organizations and in the next chapter, I will reflect on different trust and empowerment interventions.