The Creation of a Hybrid and Innovative Model of Occupational Health Delivery through the Lens of Institutional Work

Abstract

By applying the lenses of institutional work, this study presents an empirical analysis on how agents create and manage a hybrid virtual organization to provide an innovative solution to the problem of the lack of occupational health (OH) services among small businesses. We specifically focus on how these actors exploit and balance the prescriptions of different logics within this hybrid organization. Our qualitative study showed that the funders manage this virtual social enterprise through two main strategies: ‘commitment to the social mission’ and ‘support for the social mission’. The first strategy shows how the social mission helped a diverse group of funders and employees to work together as a team. The second strategy assists these actors to grant the maintenance and justify the existence of this novel organization, which provides immense societal benefits but could not support itself financially. This article shows how a hybrid organizations’ capacity for innovation and societal advantages depends on the ability to rely on multiple logics and simultaneously to shift the attention on the social mission as a catalytic force for its survival.

Towards a Multi-Level Understanding of the Strategies Employed in Managing Hybridity: A Systematic Review

“…When employees who are used to working under a pure public logic must then switch to dealing with a new market logic, and consequently with new colleagues and managers who embed this logic, then tensions can emerge. For example, public organizations have been characterized for a certain grade of rigidity and standardization of practices aimed at the public good [40,43], but when the logic of the market is introduced, cost-efficiency regularly becomes the main driver, demanding behavioral changes (e.g., providing the same standard of medical assistance while spending less time per patient [40]).…”

“…The first main step in designing a process for creating a new institutional logic is the acknowledgement of hybridization itself; without a clear and aware intention to modify a pre-existing institutional logic, the development of a new logic can be difficult [17,18,43,44,46,53]. The new institutional logic is generally developed through a new organizational template which merges the multiple established logics and their associated activities [17,18,22,46].…”

“…The governance structure of hybrid organizations must shift to accommodate and embed new logics. Hybrids need to employ new managers and workers with a solid grounding in the new, merged logic [41][42][43]. The new entrants must, however, be careful when introducing new protocols and practices.…”

“…Balancing logics means continually assessing the 'most valuable' result for the public interest, rather than (necessarily) the 'most profitable' option [42]. Overall, leadership has a key role in maintaining the new logic within the governance structures and contributing their professional and life experiences to shape the organization [12,21,43]. There is also a need to rethink the concept of 'time horizon' as another way to facilitate hybridization; the profit-making institutional logic conceptualizes time as a resource-consuming/return-on-investment factor, but if a hybrid wants to produce a consistent social/public/environmental impact, it must justify adequate investment in the short, medium and long terms [35].…”

Managing Health and Well-Being in SMEs through an Adviceline: A Typology of Managerial Behaviours

“…This service was created by a group of professionals in the field of OH in response to Dame Carol Black's review ( 2008), which highlighted the lack of OH support among SMEs (Valsecchi et al, 2019). Initially, this OH service was delivered through the National Health Service (NHS).…”