To organise and manage health promoting workplaces

Purpose and goal

The study aims to identify characteristics of health promoting leadership and to elucidate knowledge about organizational conditions that support development of health promoting leadership. Most studies focus on the pathogene aspects of health, i.e. sickleave, symptoms of bad health, etc, while a developmental approach rather should focus the salutogene aspects, i.e. initiatives, action ability, flexibility, social ability.

Expected results and effects

The results are expected to improve organisational stretegies for improving health and productivity in working life, as well as knowledge about how to implement leadership development programmes.

Planned approach and implementation

The study is prospektive and longitudinal inkluding both quantitative and qualitative measures. At baseline, employees at a number of organisations will fill in a questionnaire about leadership and work organisation characteristics, to enable a stratification on leadership and health conditions.The work units will continously be followed with regard to health and productivity for at least 2 years, and the questionnaire will be repeated yearly. Leadership in different organisational cultures will be studied in depth with qualitative interviews, and related to health and productivity development in different organisations.