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