Addressing mental health and organisational performance in tandem: A challenge and an opportunity for bringing together what belongs together

Abstract

Mental health is the “foundation of wellbeing and effective functioning for both the individual and the community” [read: team or organisation] (WHO, 2005) and is central to human behaviour across all domains, including the workplace. Organisational performance is a compound concept that reflects the function and outputs of an organisation, from its profitability and productivity to its competitive advantage. By definition, an organisation’s output depends on how effectively it functions, including how effectively its people, or human capital, functions (Neely, 2005). This means that mental health and organisational performance are inherently interconnected (Peccei & Van de Voorde, 2016). There is a widespread understanding that “good health is good for business” and that health and wellbeing play a role in both individual performance and broader organisational performance, and vice versa (Guest, 2018; Pfeffer, 2019). We see persuasive calls for research and theory into how wellbeing aligns with organisational performance and for integrating both concerns into human resources management (HRM) practices. However, organisations and managers still tend to think of mental health and organisational performance as disconnected (Van De Voorde, Paauwe, & Van Veldhoven, 2012). While businesses and governments treat organisational performance as an established priority, they give lower priority to mental health and address it in an ad hoc manner (Hasle, Seim, & Refslund, 2019; Jensen, 2000). Overall, theory recognises mental health and organisational performance goals as connected, but practice disjoints them, and businesses and governments tend to prioritise organisational performance at the expense of mental health. This editorial aims to articulate the increasingly relevant issue of the interconnection between mental health and organisational performance, to discuss the possible forces behind it, and to incentivise the reader to explore potential solutions to it. The core proposition of our editorial is that organisations have the power and responsibility to enable inherently healthy workplaces by supporting mental health and organisational performance in tandem, instead of in a disjointed manner. Why mental health and organisational performance are often considered separately. As such, presenteeism includes both the employees’ reaction of going to work sick instead of staying at home to recover and the managers’ actions to balance employees’ mental or physical health with their performance (work tasks, deadlines, demands, et cetera). Regrettably, when mental health is in focus, the tendency is for “band-aid,” individual-focused wellness solutions (exercise, diet, et cetera) rather than for fundamental changes in work conditions such as job design or organisational-level interventions (Lamontagne, Keegel, Louie, Ostry, & Landsbergis, 2007). For example, sickness presenteeism has been recently described as an individual act that aims to balance the limitations of a health condition against an employee’s performance demands to satisfy that employee’s responsibilities toward both work and health, bringing individual concerns and organisational goals together (Karanika-Murray & Biron, 2019). This results in a lack of practical insight and HR-occupational health dialogue, a weakened