ILPC 2027

Studies of programmes to change workplace practices regularly find that the degree of managerial commitment to an innovation shapes the results. Research on total quality management, for example, has found that the extent to which workers embrace the initiative depends on the way in which it is implemented. Much research, however, relies on a retrospective account of a known result. Initiatives such as TQM are, moreover, deeply ambivalent for workers, with a promise of empowerment often going along with work intensification. Worker responses will reflect this ambivalence as much as the nature of the implementation process.

This study tests an ex ante prediction against later events. It does so in relation to initiatives in health improvement which can reasonably be taken to be potentially beneficial to workers. It is also based on organisations that were selected from a group making health innovations; these organisations represent best case situations for interventions to succeed.

In our earlier work we used three organisations to represent particular points on a continuum; the first organisation, a recovery service, was identified as a fully engaged organisation. A car manufacturer was classified as being sporadically engaged and a police force was identified as only being nominally engaged in the HR initiative. Using this as a basis it was anticipated that the recovery service would have the most successful outcomes, there would be limited success in the car manufacturer and there would be no impact to the intervention in the police force. The three case studies were chosen to provide examples of three points on a continuum of engagement.

The study was designed to enable a pre-intervention baseline assessment, followed by the implementation of selected health and wellbeing interventions. The final stage, post-evaluation enabled measurement of any changes that occurred. The findings are based on a questionnaire survey and in-depth qualitative interviews conducted at both pre and post intervention stages. A total of 125 individuals were interviewed and the questionnaire survey returned 1696 responses in the 9 organisations sampled. This paper focuses on 3 of the 9 case study organisations.

 Overall the results of the study showed that the success of the innovations was limited. It might be argued that employee satisfaction was already high and hence that the innovations had little space for improvement. But comparison of measures of influence and work pressure with data from the Workplace Employment Relations Survey showed relatively low levels in the three organisations. Some specific effects were reported, but these were not strongly linked to the level of managerial commitment, and broader effects on worker attitudes were weak. Wider developments in work organisation seem to have had greater effects. It is not commitment to an innovation that is crucial but, rather, how far that innovation is embedded in organisational routines and used in practice.