Introducing a Holistic Framework of Organizational Health
Laura Holyoke
University of Idaho
As organizations are viewed more as living systems and organisms, the idea of a healthy organization is sought after; just as individuals strive “to be healthy.” The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual framework of what constitutes the health of an organization when viewed as a live system. In order to explain this framework, a working definition of health has been adopted along with a synthesis of existing theoretical frameworks from five relevant areas of organizational sciences that have proposed working theories related to organizational health. Each of the relevant areas of organizational sciences contributes to theories and research regarding organizational health; however, none offers a holistic framework as proposed here. Such a conceptualization will lay the groundwork that can be used by organizational researchers to better understand what contributes to the health of an organization. While researchers have studied organizational health, it has been from widely different perspectives, and without a common agreement of organizational health, which has led to the literature on the topic to be fractured. To date, no complete concept has been detailed which would provide a holistic view of organizational health.
Organizations and the individuals which comprise them, face an increasingly complex environment wrought with growth in technology in all fields; increased public scrutiny; changing demographics; mergers; distrust in publicly held companies (e.g., Bennis & Movius, 2006; Smart, 2003; Kezar & Eckel, 2000). In the face of this increasingly complex environment, some organizational systems manifest robustness, while others are crippled by the disequilibrium that these factors create. Organizations and their subsystems adapt to their environment--just as individuals are able to stay healthy despite adverse circumstances. Adaptation or resilience or lack thereof and the continued abilities to possess equilibrium and health are attributes which are sought to be highlighted here.
Many explanations of healthy organizations hold merit; however--if viewed individually or even in various combinations--none offers a holistic view of what elements and how they contribute to the health of an organization. Likewise, an individual can attribute his or her health to one or two practices, but such explanations do not bear the substance needed for such a complex concept. Why focus on such a complex, yet seemingly simple concept? Because to bring an understanding to what elements constitute and how they contribute to health of an organization would give organizational researchers a base to work from in regards to other organizational health issues. Accordingly, a comprehensive framework is needed which takes into account the various elements which contribute to organizational health.
Working Definition of Health and its Application to Organizations
In recent years, scholars in many of the social science disciplines have begun to ask questions about the vitality of the organizations, business, communities, governments, and nations they study. They have borrowed the concept of health from the biological and medical sciences because of its apparent fit with issues of adaptability, vibrancy, resilience, and robustness—concepts that more traditional research does not address yet are often used to describe what organizations strive to attain.
What is health? Among its many definitions (e.g., World Health Organization Constitution, 1946;American Journal of Health Promotion, 2003; Frankish, 2003), the concept of health includes: (1) a description of a living system (e.g., animals, plants, people, social systems); (2) an implication of some level of equilibrium, or balance, rather than situations of “extremes”; (3) something that can be disrupted slowly over time, or abruptly by an acute situation—both of which cause a state of debilitating disequilibrium; (4) a capacity to respond or adapt to situations, rather than to be permanently disabled by them; (5) an implication of a dynamic continuum rather than dichotomous states (i.e., healthy, unhealthy); and (6) a presence which has both subjective and objective components. For purposes of this paper these definitional concepts are incorporated into understanding the contribution-continuum each of the elements can have that constitutes organizational health.
The concept of health is very difficult to explicate in a way that makes it useful. While health seems easily recognizable in living systems, providing concrete elements and examples usually proves to be an exercise in futility. In fact, the absence of health in a living system is often described by researchers more concretely than abstract depictions of its presence. Therefore, as in the medical sciences, cases of unhealthy people (those with illnesses and injuries) are instructive in their contributions to the goal of protecting and restoring the health of all.
To apply the concept of health to organizations, scholars had to begin to conceive of an organization as something alive, as a living organism, in contrast to the more mechanistic view applied to organizations which has prevailed for hundreds of years (Miller & Miller, 1991). In the traditional mechanistic perspective, an organization is like a machine, a structured form of relationships designed as a giant tool, a way to accomplish goals that can be clearly assessed, repaired when broken, and restructured when necessary to improve productivity and heighten an organization’s competitive edge.
The traditional view of organization-as-machine is incomplete. Organizations are designed by people, as are tools, with specific structured relationships using particular technologies (including human ones), intended to meet certain collective goals. But the last half of the twentieth century witnessed the study of organizations dominated by newer paradigms that conceived of organizations as living systems:
[M]any of the most important developments in organization theory over the past sixty years. . . have led many organization theorists away from mechanical science and toward biology as a source of ideas for thinking about organization…. In pursuing this line of inquiry, organization theorists have generated many new ideas for understanding how organizations function and the factors that influence their well-being. (Miller & Miller, 1991, p. 34)
The organizational studies literature provides a fertile ground for identifying those variables that both contribute to and threaten the health of an organization. A variety of terms and concepts (other than explicit use of the words “healthy” and “unhealthy”) are to be found in this literature—which often complicate a review of the research—but the concepts involved are consistent with living systems theory, and can be distinguished from other organizational constructs which describe organizational functioning, effectiveness, or productivity—all of which originate, as a whole or in part, from distinctly different theoretical paradigms. In addition, these concepts that come from different areas of the literature tend to be fragmented in a way that each does not consider the perspective of others in any attempt to find connections between “healthy” concepts.
Background and Genesis of an Organizational Health Framework
The conceptual foundations that come closest to consideration of what constitutes organizational health are the fields of organizational studies and organizational sociology. Both are based on multidisciplinary views of organizations; within them, the perspective of individual organizational members is considered—in addition to structural, cultural, political, subsystem, and organismic perspectives. Respected scholars in the field call for such an approach as well:
[M]ultiple disciplines have contributed to the current state of knowledge on the various dimensions of healthy work organization, yet little cross-fertilization exists among the disciplines. . . . An interdisciplinary approach to the study of healthy work organization can result in the leaps of knowledge that are necessary to move this field of study forward and keep pace with the constantly changing conditions of work. (Wilson, DeJoy, Vandenberg, Richardson, & McGrath, 2004 p. 583)
Five categories of the organizational sciences literature—when viewed collectively—hold the most substantial promise in understanding a construct as complex as that of organizational health. These categories are based on the work of a small non-profit group, The Center for Organizational Reform (COR). COR is composed of a consortium of researchers exploring issues of organizational health, its mission is to teach about and research issues regarding the impact on change on organizations of all kinds.1
When combined, the identified categories each contribute to form the conceptual framework of organizational health. These categories include organizational psychology and behavior, organizational subsystem health and dysfunction, organismic health and pathology, organizational life cycle theories, and health of organizational cultures. By drawing from such a wide variety of literature, the complexity of the concept is illuminated; just as in a human organism, when health is studied all aspects that make up and contribute to health must be taken into account.
Organismic Health and Pathology
The encompassing element that contributes to the conceptual framework of organizational health is organismic health and pathology. Many organizational scholars apply a diagnostic label to whole organizations or their subparts; this approach essentially views the entire organization as an organism which can, at any different time, be found on the healthy-unhealthy continuum. While this approach could be considered an embodiment in which the other four elements contribute; it is used here as one of the elements that contributes to organizational health.
Examples of this research in the organizational literature often refer to the organization as if it were human. Two of the best known are the models of White (1997) and Merry and Brown (1987). White describes the condition of “organizational distress,” which constitutes a stage of deteriorating organizational health that occurs when tasks essential to the survival of an organization are impaired because of the professional distress of its workforce. He also describes “toxic organizations,” in which any personnel cannot thrive—regardless of role—without experiencing a deterioration of physical and/or psychological health. Merry and Brown, who approach organizations from a Gestalt perspective, frame organizational health as a state of equilibrium in which “reality” is clearly recognized and dealt with appropriately. In some organizations, however, repetitive patterns of inappropriate behaviors and “pockets of dysfunction” interfere with members’ abilities to either see or to respond to some realities in a rational manner; Merry and Brown call this phenomenon “neurotic organizational behavior.” The organization displaying neurotic behaviors almost always blocks awareness of its own socioemotional needs, and, at later stages of neurosis, of its task needs. If these patterns are not addressed, organizational health will continue to deteriorate, and the organization will become a “declining organization,” in which distortions of reality have reached such a magnitude that the institution’s outputs are increasingly disabled.
Other organizational researchers whose work falls into the category of viewing organizations as organisms include Diamond (1993), who maintains that organizations have “unconscious lives,” Hirschhorn (1988), who contends that individuals in organizations unconsciously adopt organizational characteristics as part of their unconscious world views, and Allcorn and Diamond (1997), who describe the “psychologically defensive workplace,” an organization (or one of its units) that encourages defensive, compliant, false personalities and discourages spontaneous, true personalities among employees—thus leading to role strain that, over time, begins to color the organization’s internal health. Obholzer and Roberts (1994) document various and mutually interacting sources of individual and organization distress in some organizational settings. Argyris (1976; 1985; 1986; 1990; 1978; 1974), who coined the concept of the “learning organization,” suggests that healthy organizations are capable of “double-loop learning,” whereas their less healthy counterparts have disabling defenses and can manifest only “single-loop” learning, or—in the most extreme situations—cannot learn at all. Senge (1990) has termed this handicap an organizational “learning disability.”
Pauchant and Mitroff (1992) describe crisis-prone organizations, in which crises of huge proportions are just waiting to happen; just as some individuals are accident-prone, so are some organizations. Indicators of the degree of “crisis proneness” can be found at the individual, cultural, structural, and strategic levels of organizations.
Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior (Individual member health and dysfunction)
The foundational assumption of those who frame organizational health places responsibility for an organization’s health as emanating from the overall health of its individual members. Conversely, the etiology of unhealthy organizations rests in one or more toxic individuals and his/her/their negative influence on the entire system. Metaphorically, such a pathological individual could “infect” a department or an entire organization. The implicit antidote to such toxic situations is to “heal” the responsible person and/or to exorcise them from the organization, thus permitting the system to return to a state of equilibrium.
At least three foci of attention to the individual health perspective exist in the current organizational literature. The first addresses conditions that can “infect” any member of an organization, given the wrong circumstances, which subsequently create a harmful effect on the subsystem’s (or the entire organization’s) well-being. The second focus concerns the possibility of the presence of more seriously psychologically impaired individuals within an organizational unit, and the adverse consequences of this person’s behavior on others and upon the overall climate. The third area of focus is similar to the second, but documents the organizational effects when the psychologically impaired person is the organization’s leader.
In the first focus area, the research in organizational psychology and organizational behavior provides a rich reservoir of models that are readily applicable to individual well-being within contemporary organizations. Keeping in mind the press of increasing competition in organizations of all kinds, some types of concerns would appear to be of relevance to the health of personnel in general, and have critical consequences on the systemic health of departments. For example, the “work-life balance” issue is no doubt of concerns to individuals who must balance the increasing press of their careers with life outside of their professional roles. Fassel (1990) and Bracke and Bugental (1995) have researched the phenomenon of “workaholism,” a “process” or “existential addiction” which is increasingly common under conditions of work intensification, as is the case in contemporary organizational settings.
Second, literature also includes analyses of individuals who are not in formal leadership roles, but nonetheless can greatly impact organizational health, specifically that of a department, team, or group. Some scholars (e.g., Ackroyd & Thompson, 1999; Andersson & Pearson, 1999; Johnson & Indvik, 2001; Sagie, Stashevsky, & Koslowsky, 2003; Stack, 2003) provide documentation of “organizational misbehavior” by individuals, and the impact of such behaviors of their colleagues, upon clients and customers, and upon the organization as a whole. Psychological researchers such as Hare (1993) and Stout (2005) have documented the disastrous impact of individuals with such mental pathologies as sociopathology/psychopathology, a condition that can be found in one in every 25 individuals in the general population (Stout, 2005).
Third, the leadership and management literatures provide numerous case studies of exemplary leaders and their salutary influence on an organization’s increased vibrancy. The attributes of positive leadership mostly can be found in the organizational leadership literature, as well as in the research on organizational management and organizational effectiveness, which result in leadership prescriptions highly correlated with success.
On the “unhealthy” end of the leadership spectrum—describing organizational health by its absence, the literature is less abundant, although this research has increased in recent years. It is much less common to locate cases of “toxic leaders” and their destructive impact on organizations. Kets de Vries and Miller (1984), in one of the earliest anthologies of “sick organizations,” contend that the mental health of an organization’s top leaders will impact the culture of the entire organization. Kets de Vries (1983; 1985; 1986; 1988; 1989; 1991; 1993a; 1993b; 1995) and other organizational psychologists (e.g., Lowen, 1985; Maccoby, 2003) have written explicitly about the rising frequency of individuals with Narcisisstic Personality Disorder and other disabilities to positions of executive leadership in the corporate world. More recent examples come from Kellerman’s (2004) study of “bad leaders” and Lipman-Blumen’s (2005) case studies of “toxic leaders.” Examining individual’s impact on organizational health is one important element that contributes to the conceptual framework.
Organizational Subsystem Health and Dysfunction
Another important element in studying organizational health is that of the subsystems that comprise the organization. As subsystems make up the majority of organizations they are considered a key element in the conceptual framework of organizational health. Historically, organizational scholars have studied smaller units of organizations—such as departments—from the perspective of organization development (OD), small group theory, and, most recently, the application of the family systems field to implications for an organization’s health and well-being. Foundational to all of these approaches is the conceptualization of an organization as a living system composed of multiple subsystems. Subsystem health and total-system health are interdependent.
The well-established field of organization development (OD) as a specific philosophy and method to increase organizational effectiveness includes many specific models focusing on subsystem health. Small group theory, which differs in its empirical origin, nevertheless parallels OD in its attention to those monitors of internal functioning necessary to a group’s health over time. Most of these models include the following concepts: (1) group members know how to work together to achieve their task goals; (2) they know and practice strong maintenance or process behaviors (e.g., goal-setting, problem-solving, decision-making, and conflict resolution/management); and (3) they also practice boundary maintenance, or regulating both internal and external boundaries effectively (e.g., Cummings, 1980; Dalton & Lawrence, 1970; French, Bell, & Zawacki, 1978; French & Bell, 1990; Lippitt, 1982; Margulies & Raia, 1978; Massarik, 1990; Mirvis & Berg, 1977; White & Wooten, 1986).
In the last 20 years, organizational scholars have begun to borrow concepts from family systems researchers, finding that these models have much in common with organizational subunits: they are open systems within larger systems; are “generational” in nature, have leaders; and their members possess differing degrees of cohesiveness and conflict (Brotheridge & Lee, 2006). These same scholars have empirically proven that when organizational subsystems (i.e., departments, teams) break down, similar patterns can be identified as those found in “dysfunctional” families: their members can often have issues with diffuse or enmeshed boundaries; they can have splits in the “governing coalition;” and possess triangulated relationships (Brotheridge & Lee, 2006; Schaef, 1986; Davidson, 1993). Goff and Goff (1991) documented how aspects of co-dependence, such as found in families in which one or more individuals had an addiction, can also be identified in organizations. They describe organizational co-dependence especially found in settings characterized by: (1) depersonalization; (2) hierarchy; (3) comparisons and competition; (4) poor communication patterns; and (5) lack of appreciation for the spiritual dimension.
Organizational Life Cycle Theories
Another important element to a comprehensive framework in studying organizational health is the concept of organizational life cycles. Organizational life cycle theorists pose analogies between the birth, growth, maturation, and decline of human beings to that of organizations of all kinds. From a living systems perspective, this analogy holds because both kinds of systems—human and organizational—are “alive,” until they cease to physically exist.
Adizes (1988; 1999), Kimberly and Miles (1980), Tichy (1980), and Greiner (1972) are seminal names among the organizational life cycle researchers. Each stage poses unique aspects that may be considered as strengths and weaknesses which affect an organization’s health throughout its life cycle. For example, the “liability of newness” threatens the very survival of “infant organizations,” as they struggle to compete with older, more established institutions in their domains. The “infant mortality rate” of new organizations is very high. For those organizations that do survive their founding periods, high energy levels are often characteristic of a period of fast-growth.
“Adolescent organizations,” like human teenagers, tend to be characterized by risk-taking and a denial of their mortality (Adizes, 1999). When organizations “finally settle down” to adulthood, or maturity, they tend to be stable and have adequate resources to meet their day-to-day needs (unlike the chronic resource shortages characteristic of new organizations). However, the new era of increased competition poses specific threats for mature organizations, which can quickly be out-performed by more “nimble” organizations in their fields (Beatty & Ulrich, 1991).
“Stagnating” or “declining” organizations are those in “old age,” and will probably never regain the vibrancy necessary to compete with those founded more recently, or who have worked on their “agility” and health in order to be able to face the increased stresses of a new external environment (Cameron, 1987; Freeman & Hannan, 1975). Cameron, Whetton, and Kim (cite) an emerging consensus in the literature that a variety of dysfunctional organizational attributes are associated with conditions of decline, and identify some of those factors as (1) increases in conflict, secrecy, scapegoating, self-protective behaviors, rigidity, and turnover, and, simultaneously, (2) decreases in morale, innovativeness, participation, and long-term planning (Cameron, Whetten, & Kim, 1987; Cameron, Kim, & Whetten, 1987). As in individual health, it is important to consider organizational life cycles in the conceptual framework of organizational health.
The Health of Organizational Cultures
The last key element to the conceptual framework is organizational culture. The literature on organizational cultures traces its genesis to the 1960s and 1970s, but began to proliferate in the early 1980s. The question, “What distinguishes a healthy from an unhealthy organizational culture?” is seldom addressed in the organizational literature. Rather, organizational cultures are often analyzed for the propensity to either help, or to hinder, the organization to reach its goals. Again, the best clues to cultural health are found in those few instances of conceptual “unhealth.” Although the vast majority of empirical work on cultures in general (by anthropologists and sociologists), as well as by organizational scholars, views cultures as neither inherently “good or bad,” few theorists have attempted to document ways in which cultures can be “unhealthy.” A notable exception is Edgerton’s (1992) meta-analysis of maladaptive cultures, defined as those which maintain beliefs, values, and social institutions that result in senseless cruelty, needless suffering, and monumental folly in their internal relations and in their dealings with their external environments. Edgerton maintains that continual survival alone is not a sufficient indicator of cultural adaptation—meaning that maladaptive cultures can prevail in their environments for long periods of time.
In regard to organizational culture, Gabriel (1991) maintains that an organization can be said to be culturally harmful when its culture is unable to reduce or to mediate high levels of organizational anxiety and human suffering in its members. Flam (1993) describes greedy organizations as those which attempt to secure complete loyalty and voluntary compliance from their members, striving to become the sole basis for their members’ social identities. In this sense, they set up extraordinarily demanding requests on individuals; obedience and compliance are products of the combination of fear and loyalty. Hennestad (1990) describes double bind organizational settings as those in which members are, on their own, incapable of investigating and gaining insight into their own cultures and important mixed messages that are being culturally communicated. Such cultures have norms of undiscussability that prohibit their members from voicing their confusion about these mixed messages. Hennestad maintains that in such cultures, organizational dynamics emerge “behind the backs” of organizational members and the organization is disabled from a healthy ability to self-correct its own dysfunctional norms.
The vast literature on the political dynamics of organizations is included in the cultural paradigm of scholarship because issues of power, influence, rank, status, privilege, conflict, and access to resources—the foci of such scholarship—is impossible to separate from other cultural dynamics in which they are embedded. Pfeffer (1981; 1992; 1994), Ott (1989), Trice and Beyer (1993), and Mintzberg (e.g., 1985) are seminal names in the political perspectives in the organizational scholarship. A common perception about organizational “politics” is that its prevalence is “unhealthy.” However, because issues of power and resource distribution, etc. are a part of the cultural fabric of organizational life, they are inextricably embedded and extremely difficult to empirically isolate.
Another concept of organizational culture was explored by Holyoke (2004) on organizational “group hijacking” which sought to explore the use of one type of power common to some small group dynamics. As a result Holyoke defined the archetype of “group hijacking” as occurring when, (1) within an intact group, (2) any member of the group (3) uses some form of coercive power (Tedeschi & Felson, 1994), (4) the use of which falls outside of the group’s established cultural norms, (5) to block, derail, or redirect the direction the group appears to be moving. Many of the settings reported by participants in this study were that of an “unhealthy culture” as an organizational antecedent leading up to the “hijacking event.”
Recap
This paper introduces a comprehensive conceptual framework to explore what and how different elements contribute to the health of organizations. A foundational premise of the framework is based on viewing organizations as living systems. The comprehensive framework includes five categories: Organismic Health and Pathology; Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior (Individual member health and dysfunction); Organizational Subsystem Health and Dysfunction; Organizational Life Cycle Theories; and The Health of Organizational Cultures.
This framework provides a holistic way to study the complex structure of working systems of organizations as they try to maintain equilibrium and health. Organizational health is too complex to view through just one lens; rather it should be viewed simultaneously through multiple perspectives, like looking through a prism, for a richer, more complete understanding of the whole system. Hence, the synthesized framework that I have recommended in this paper is needed. Only when researchers take such a holistic approach will they have a complete understanding of organizational health.
Footnotes
1. A more complete description of COR’s work can be found at www.corhome.org
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