People & Strategy Winter 2015 Vol. 38 Issue 1 - 52

THOUGHTLEADERS

Fostering Organizational Health and Wellness
A Conversation with Dr. W. Warner Burke

People & Strategy special editor, Michael Bazigos, Ph.D., recently had the opportunity to
interview Dr. W. Warner Burke, Edward Lee Thorndike Professorship of Psychology and
Education; education program coordinator for graduate programs in social-organizational
psychology; and former chair of the Department of Organization and Leadership at Teachers
College, Columbia University.
The interview was as wide ranging as the topic area, and touched on a variety of examples of
healthy and unhealthy management-performance management, rewards and recognition,
culture, climate and leadership-as well as the state of research linking organizational health
to company performance and Dr. Burke's view of a critical success factor in organizational
transformations which CHROs will especially want to note.

Michael Bazigos: To begin, there are two
terms in this special issue's title: organizational health and wellness. How do you
understand each of those terms, and how
would you define them?
W. Warner Burke: I like the question because
wellness is an outcome and health is a process, so that's the fundamental difference
between the two. Obviously, we are talking
about the same domain of life, but I would
think that from the standpoint of trying to
understand those terms vis-à-vis an organization whose leaders' ultimate objective is to
make the organization as well as possible. So
wellness is always a desired outcome and an
objective. But to get there you have to focus
on issues of health, and I don't believe that
most executives understand what that means,
or are necessarily equipped to build and sustain the health of the organization. It's
interesting that people in organizations
invoke the health metaphor, for example,
"How sick can that decision process be?" or,
"Well, last night when I got us into the wonderful land of wellbeing." So, we do use the
language. When I say "we," I mean organizational members in general.
For example, here at Teachers College, we use
language like that all the time. The word toxic
is now in vogue, and has been for quite some
time. We talk about toxic leaders; we talk
about toxic organizations and so forth. And
so the antidote to all that is health and well52

PEOPLE & STRATEGY

ness, but we're focused on the negative. This
obviously contravenes the literature on positive psychology which validates that we focus
unduly on negative aspects of organization
behavior and insufficiently on the positive
aspects. We do need to focus much more on
the positive.
Positive psychology research has shown
unequivocally that when practiced, it leads to
healthier organizations, and people feel better when they focus on positive things. Now,
that can obviously go too far, and it can
become tired and heavy. But it is nevertheless
out of balance in most organizational life,
meaning that negative aspects-toxic aspects
take more of our time, energy, and effort than
positive ones. To get the same benefits, we
have to work almost two to three times
harder under negative conditions than we do
under positive ones.

MB: What would you describe as the characteristics of a healthy organization? Let's take
it from the positive side first.
WWB: I think that anything that helps people
in the organization avoid paranoia can lead
to much healthier situations. When others are
closed and not open-when we don't know
what's going on and why people are making
decisions that we can't make, and things of
that nature-that leads to "what" thinking:
"What am I doing that people are trying to
get me for?" and so forth, and that can indeed

lead to feelings of stress-the opposite of
wellness. For example, I was just talking to a
colleague yesterday who mentioned how
stressed she felt and had, she said, one of the
worst headaches she has ever had. So there is
a direct connection between how we perceive
what is going on in an organization and our
feelings in terms of wellness.
That argues, from my point of view, for organizations to be far more open than they are
and allow people to express themselves without fear of retribution. It argues for an open
system on the broad sense of that term where
people can feel that what is being discussed
is actually honest. And it argues for a system
where people use the word integrity more
often than they use the word toxic.

MB: Let me pick up on the word system. You
just talked about an open system and you
were talking about an open and trusting climate. What can organizations do to foster
that? What needs to go well at a systemic
level?
WWB: We tend to talk about problems with
respect to the culture. Well, you know, that
means you are going to have to go into a huge
effort of trying to change the culture, and
that's going to take years. So I think it is far
better to concentrate at the local unit level in
terms of the climate- how people are working together and how they feel about their
boss and things of that nature. That's the level
within the system where you get the biggest
and fastest payoff, the work-unit level.
There are such things as clarity: how it's just
so important for people to be clear about
what's expected of them; that's a climate
dimension. [And] standards: are people managed according to standards, or does the
management process come across as purely
arbitrary? The difference between those two
has a major effect in terms of how people feel
about their work situation. Recognition
informally, you know, the pats on the back

People & Strategy Winter 2015 Vol. 38 Issue 1

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of People & Strategy Winter 2015 Vol. 38 Issue 1