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 (Neely, 2005).By definition, an organisation's output depends on how effectively it functions, including how effectively its people, or human capital, functions.This means that mental health and organisational performance are inherently interconnected (Peccei & Van de Voorde, 2016).Despite a widespread understanding that "good health is good for business," 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, especially during economically challenging times, they give lower priority to mental health and address it in an ad hoc manner (Hasle, Seim, & Refslund, 2019;Jensen, 2000).However, scholars increasingly agree that health and wellbeing play a role in both individual performance and broader organisational performance and vice versa (Guest, 2018;Pfeffer, 2019).We also see persuasive calls to explore whether wellbeing is of benefit to, or comes into conflict with, achieving positive organisational performance.Most recently, experts have stressed the need to develop research and models that integrate mental health and organisational performance concerns into human resources management (HRM) practices.Overall, theory recognizes mental health and organisational performance goals as connected, but practice disjoints them, and businesses and governments tend to prioritize organisational performance at the expense of mental health.This guest 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 incentivize the reader to explore potential solutions to it.We discuss how mental health interconnects with organisational performance in both research and practice, and present examples of healthy workplaces that integrate the concern for mental health and organisational performance into their structures, processes, and mental models.Our core proposition 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.To understand how mental health interconnects with organisational performance, we examine organisational behavior at a micro level and organisational structures on a broader level.For example, a recent analysis of sickness presenteeism describes it 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 (Karanika-Murray & Biron, 2019).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, etc.).

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