Organisational Health

Nowadays it appears to be increasingly important for public and private organisations to know how to react to external changes also by taking innovative business organisation measures, preserving and/or improving the so-called “organisational health”. Organisational health refers to the organisation’s ability to reconcile the achievement of collective and individual goals. More specifically, it is the ability to achieve the organisational performance desired and, at the same time, the ability to generate a working context in which it is possible to safeguard and improve the psychophysical wellbeing of people. Organisational health can be explored in terms of the organisational, motivational and behavioural implications on the Management and employees of Public Administrations. The main aspects concerning organisational health include: motivational processes of the people involved in the organisational contexts; leadership processes, in particular with regard to the directors, supervisors and all those in a position of responsibility, with reference to a “methodological” type of leadership; work organisation processes from the perspective of job co-design, valuing autonomy and proactivity on the part of operators and the ability to work as a team. The conditions of satisfactory organisational health are those in which people are valued for their individual capabilities, including in a group context. This aspect is even more marked if the purposes of the organisational context demand activities of a complex nature, sophisticated or in any case frequent and significative problem solving actions, creativity or a certain level of non-repetition of the solutions. In the Public Value Pyramid model, organisational health – seen as the adequacy of the authority’s organisation in relation to its aims and strategies – is one of the types of health of the resources necessary to achieve performance in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and impact. The issue of Agile Working also falls within this context, as a lever for organisational development.