Investigating Healthy Organizations: Development and Testing of a Public Organization Wellness Quotient (WQ)

This dissertation investigates and further develops organization health theory in the context of public organizations. This is an important line of inquiry for two reasons. First, the healthy organizations literature and healthy organization theory is inchoate and lacks overall coherence (Dejoy et al., 2010), especially in public organization theory and research. As such many organization theorists have called for expansive solutions and insist this requires consideration of the collective and systemic interactive levels of analysis (Salanova et al., 2012; Schein, 2006). Second, we notice organizations now devoting considerable resources to nurturing individual and organizational health and wellness (Dale & Burrell, 2014; Parks & Steelman, 2008). Ostensibly, this is because health has been demonstrated to enhance or compromise a myriad of organizational outcomes including satisfaction, performance, sustainability, and survival (Pfeffer, 2010; Cooper, 1994). Moreover, organizational health and individual health share a vicarious and interdependent relationship (McHugh & Brotherton, 2000). In response to this “healthy exigency” and in effort to enhance the health of our public organizations, this dissertation employs an interdisciplinary lens to investigate healthy organizations at the systemic interactive level of analysis. The overarching purpose of the study is to provide theoretical contributions and empirical evidence concerning the key factors necessary for the development of healthy public organizations. To accomplish this, I assemble a holistic organizational wellness (HOW) theoretical framework. The HOW framework supports development of a Wellness Quotient (WQ) with data from the 2017 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS). The WQ represents the dissertations main contribution, as currently no standardized measure of public organization health (or wellness) exists. Through a process of discovery and analysis which includes multiple iterations of confirmatory factor analyses and a regression analysis, it is found that the WQ has a significant impact on organization performance and satisfaction. The results also confirm this studies hypotheses the WQ may be useful as a proxy for future healthy public organizations research. In sum, the HOW framework and WQ not only contribute to theoretical and empirical development of healthy public organizations, respectively, but they both may serve as useful tools for public organizational health design and development.