Workplace Well-being: How to Build Psychologically Healthy Workplaces

15 Designing Healthy Workplaces

Catherine Loughlin and Danielle Mercer

Saint Mary's University, Halifax, NS, Canada

Introduction

Pfeffer (1998a) outlined core principles for designing “high-commitment, high-performance, high-involvement” workplaces (i.e., reduced status differences, extensive sharing of information, selective hiring, self-managed teams and decentralization, continuous training, high compensation based on performance, and employment security). Organizations in North America appear to have made limited progress in improving these elements of the workplace. In his 2009 Harvard Business Review article, Hamel issued a call from (and for) thought leaders in management to “reinvent management” and make it “relevant to a volatile world” (Hamel, 2009). The challenges identified for immediate action echoed those that Pfeffer had identified a decade before (i.e., the need to eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy, to share the work of setting organizational direction, to destructure and disaggregate organizations, to expand the scope of employee autonomy, and to redefine leadership). These management thinkers concluded that structures such as bureaucratic control, standardization, and hierarchy had evolved little since the time of Taylor in the 1900s and that these systems no longer supported organizations facing continuous rapid change in complex environments, with globalization, a diverse workforce, and a new generation of employees with different needs and ...