Chronically ill employees in the context of organizational culture

Year 2009, Volume: 4 Issue: 23, 131 - 152, 01.01.2009

Helen Kopnina Joke Haafkens

Abstract

In this article, the differences in implementation of policies in relation to chronically ill employees are discussed in the context of organizational culture. It appears that an appropriate organizational culture is required to be able to take measures to retain chronically ill employees. Various stakeholders view organizational culture as a magic bullet to help introduce company policy to retain chronically ill workers. Within functionalist approach to organizational culture, the three perspectives integration, fragmentation and differentiation can be distinguished. According to these perspectives, we classify organizations in accordance to the decision-making and hierarchical structures. We shall explore how the three organizational culture perspectives can be used for understanding what may constitute ‘best practice’ or ‘best strategy’ in order to address the question of what the organizations can do to facilitate sustained employability for chronically ill workers. The main objective was to determine what type of organizational culture is more effective for policies and practices in case of optimal functioning of chronically ill employees. Preliminary research results are based on a number of case studies conducted with the managers and HRM of government and commercial organizations between March 2007 and October 2008. These case studies were based on open interviews and focus group sessions for human resource departments which were consequently analyzed using thematic analysis. For group sessions, we used concept mapping to collect information from two groups of HRM professionals and managers. Concept mapping is a structured methodology for eliciting, organizing and aggregating the ideas of groups of diverse stakeholders on a certain focus question. It uses qualitatively collected data from group members and results in quantitatively derived graphic maps concept maps displaying the interrelationships among ideas expressed by the group and its subgroups. iiiWe used literature study using systematic hand-search strategy involving medical, statistical, management and social science databases Web of Science, MedLine, Pub Med, Psych Info, etc. . For the purpose of this study we only included physical and NOT psychological or mental disorders

Keywords

organizational culture, policy, employees, chronic diseases, integration approach, fragmentation approach, differentiation approach

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