Health in Organization: Towards a Process-Based View

This paper reports on a collaborative project involving organization scholars and clinicians to examine the ways in which individual and organizational health are conceptualized in the literature. We illustrate how the use of systems theories (in this case complexity theory) in relation to organizational health introduces problems such as the risk of promoting organizational health at the expense of individual well-being. The phenomena of organizational health and individual health are often presented as having a symbiotic relationship and we suggest some circumstances where this is not the case. Our central argument is that we need to move beyond current conceptual limitations and move towards a more process-based model of health in organization rather than organizational health. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2007.