Psychosocial health in organisations

1
Psychosocial health in organisations

• A question of perspective

2
How to study this issue

• Be integrative
• Use exemplars in you thinking and writing
• Build your own matrix of knowledge based around
  reading and thinking
• Practice answer in the sample questions on the
  next slide

3
Questions

• What is psychosocial health in organisations?
• Do organisational models and theories help
  improve the performance of organisations?
• What is the difference between mental health and
  mental illness?
• Do we find psychopathology in the workplace
• Can we re-conceptualise organisations in terms of
  the quality of interpersonal interactions and the
  impact it has on behaviour and perceptions?
• Does this enable us to look at process rather
  than outcomes?

4
What is psychosocial health in an organisational
setting

• Contrast between Mental Health and Mental
  illness
• Metaphors and models in organisations
• Contact and the interpretation of people behaviour

5
Psychosocial health and how we might run
organisations.

• There is no such thing as normal.
• Diversity is an asset
• Emotional security is a key feature of
  psychological comfort and so of personal
  productivity
• A different type of intervention affords itself
  with a psychosocial health metaphor

6
Psychosocial health and practicing manager?

• What is a manager? Is it a redundant term?
• Are there generic management skills?
• Management as organisational facilitation
• Managers the bottom level of the organisation.

7
How does all this differ from the notion of
organisational culture?

• Ideally the same
• Notion of organisational culture has become
  corrupted by western consultancy practice.
• Conventional Organisational perspectives are
  vapid and empty

8
What about the notion of management style and
leadership?

• Management of expectations within and between
  people
• The question of cognitive style
• Theories of leadership
• What makes a good manager?

9
Impact on training and development

• Very bad to concentrate on form or style at
  the expense of content
• This is what happens with theory driven views of
  organisations and management that think
  management is like engineering, in that you can
  converge to an answer

10
Really developing organisations

• A challenge
• To behave convergent and divergently at the same
  time
• Have plans but accept their epehemrmnealnature
• Concentrate on the quality of the organisational
  process.

11
Recognising what is really important in a job

• KSATs are not the only fruit
• How do we assess
• IP skills
• Empathy
• Listening
• Thinking
• Or should we not assess
• In which case what should we do

12
One answer lies in mental health model of
organisational development

• Provides a radically different approach
• Much simpler and more honest
• Cheaper
• More effective
• More enabling, eclectic and democratic

13
Radically different

• From conventional Organisational approaches
• Where we concentrate on form rather than content

14
Simpler

• Possible to develop simple approaches and methods

15
Cheaper

• Should be

16
Effective?

• Time will tell