Christian Gadolin

Healthcare quality improvement work: a professional employee perspective

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze conditions that influence how employees engage in healthcare quality improvement (QI) work. Design/methodology/approach Qualitative case study based on interviews ( n=27) and observations ( n=10). Findings The main conditions that influence how employees engage in healthcare QI work are professions, work structures and working relationships. These conditions can both prevent and facilitate healthcare QI. Professions and work structures may cement existing institutional logics and thus prevent employees from engaging in healthcare QI work. However, attempts to align QI with professional logics, together with work structures that empower employees, can make these conditions increase employee engagement, which can be accomplished through positive working relationships that foster institutional work, which bridge different competing institutional logics, making it possible to overcome barriers that professions and work structures may constitute. Practical implications Understanding the conditions that influence how employees engage in healthcare QI work will make initiatives more likely to succeed. Originality/value Healthcare QI has mainly been studied from an implementer perspective, and employees have either been neglected or seen as passive resisters. Weak employee perspectives make healthcare QI research incomplete. In our research, healthcare QI work is studied closely at the actor level to understand healthcare QI from an employee perspective.

Internal Communication for Change : a Complex Challenge

Internal communication is a vital component in any change process and a major part of change management. This paper presents a qualitative study of a large industrial company and its change project. The paper contributes to our understanding of communication in change management projects with its description and analysis of the construction of project communication at this company as well as of the managers’ and other employees’ perception of it. The research emphasises that communication is a pivotal part of large change management projects while pointing to its complexity and many pitfalls. Thus, the paper advances the empirical and practical change management research.

Institutional Work Through Interaction in Healthcare

This study examines how interactions between individual actors can form institutional work in a highly institutionalized setting. Recent progress within the institutional logics perspective has directed focus to the roles of individual actors, their strategic actions, and how institutional logics may be interpreted and rebalanced. However, these contributions are founded on individual actors’ identity processes, but not on how institutional work can be performed through interactions among individual actors adhering to different institutional logics. We performed a qualitative case study, based on observations and interviews, with a focus on quality-improvement work performed in a hospital. The study affirmed that institutional work primarily maintains and upholds the rigidity of healthcare organizations, by interactions that either preserve the distance between different institutional logics or prevent their mutual influence on each other. However, when institutional work transcends maintaining – towards ...