Health Care Industry Council

Improving Direct Care Work: Integrating Theory, Research and Practice
by Michele Ochsner, Carrie Leana and Eileen Appelbaum
ochsner-leana-appelbaum-improving-direct-care-work-2009

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A Dual-Driver Model of Retention and Turnover in the Direct Care Workforce
by Vikas Mittal, Jules Rosen and Carrie Leana
mittal-rosen-leana-turnover-and-retention-of-direct-care-workers-2009

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Role for a Labor-Management Partnership in Nursing Home Person-Centered Care
by Walter Leutz, Christine Bishop and Lisa Dodson
http://gerontologist.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/gnp123?ijkey=4Nv5mBHp8FLohwF&keytype=ref

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Changing Organizational Designs and Frontiers of Healthcare Clinics
By Andrew Van de Ven and Ricky Leung
This paper empirically examines the relative performance and adaptiveness of generalist and specialist organizational designs in changing fitness landscapes over time.  We apply Data Envelope Analysis (DEA) to examine the performance of primary care medical clinics that are designed to serve [...]

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Practice Under Pressure: Primary Care Physicians and Their Medicine in the 21st Century
By Timothy Hoff
Through 95 in-depth interviews with primary care physicians (PCPs) working in different settings, as well as medical students and residents, Practice Under Pressure provides rich insight into the everyday lives of generalist physicians in the early 21st century.
Available in October 2009 [...]

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Temporal Flexibility and Careers: The Role of Large-Scale Organizations for Physicians
By Forrest Briscoe
This study investigates how employment in large-scale organizations affects the work lives of practicing physicians.  Well-established theory associates larger organizations with bureaucratic constraint, loss of workplace control, and dissatisfaction, but this author finds that large scale is also associated with greater scheduling and [...]

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Why Hospitals Don’t Learn from Failures
By Anita Tucker and Amy Edmondson

The importance of hospitals learning from their failures hardly needs to be stated.  Not only are matters of life and death at stake on a daily basis, but also an increasing number of U.S. hospitals are operating in the red.  This article reports on in [...]

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The Adoption Gap
By Jason Lee, Carol Cain, Scott Young, Nancy Chockley and Helen Burstin
Health information technology (HIT) can promote higher quality, lower costs, and increased patient and clinician satisfaction.  Yet small practice settings (where the vast majority of patient care is provided) have been slow to adopt HIT products and services.  Successful adoption requires close [...]

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Coordination in Fast-Response Organizations
By Samer Faraj and Yan Xiao
Organizational coordination has traditionally been viewed from an organizational design perspective where rules, modalities and structures are used to meet the information processing demands of the environment.  Fast-response organizations face unique coordination challenges as they operate under conditions of high uncertainty, fast decision making and where mistakes [...]

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Professional Work: The Emergence of Collaborative Community
By Paul Adler, Seok-Woo Kwon and Charles Heckscher
This paper traces the main lines of evolution of the organization of professional work.  The argument is illustrated with material on the case of doctors and hospitals.  Market and hierarchy principles have become progressively more salient in professional work; but we argue [...]

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Healthcare Reform and the Workplace Experience of Nurses
By Paul Clark, Darlene Clark, David Day and Dennis Shea

The introduction of market-based reforms over the past twenty-five years has fundamentally changed the way healthcare is delivered in the United States. This paper reports the results of a survey of the workplace experiences and attitudes of hospital-based [...]

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Nurses’ Unions Efforts to Give RNs a Greater Voice in Patient Care
By Paul Clark and Darlene Clark

This paper will examine the efforts of nurses’ unions to give registered nurses (RNs) a greater voice in the delivery of patient care in acute-care hospitals.  Collective bargaining provides a forum in which nurses can voice their concerns about [...]

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Evaluating the Quality of Interactions between Medical Students and Nurses in a Large Teaching Hospital
By Gregory Nadolski, Mary Bell, Barbara Brewer, Richard Frandel, Herbert Cushing and James Brewer
Effective health care depends on multidisciplinary collaboration and teamwork, and yet little is know about how well medical students and nurses interact in the hospital environment, where physicians-in-training [...]

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Modularity and the Coordination of Complex Work: The Case of Post-Surgical Patient Care
By Jody Hoffer Gittell, Farbod Hagigi and Dana Weinberg
We examine the coordination of a modular system under varying degrees of complexity, exploring how work is coordinated within and between modules.  In so doing, we offer a new approach to the concept of modularity.  [...]

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The Role of Union Leadership and Union Attitudes in Healthcare Workers’ Preparedness for Technological Innovation
By Julie Sadler

The present paper investigates the relationship between union members’ views about the participatory style of the union leadership, commitment to the union, and commitment to the nursing home.  Understanding the relationship between union leadership, union commitment, and organizational [...]

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Pathways to Better Healthcare: Electronic Medical Records Keeping, Employment and Labor Relations, and Resident Care
By David B. Lipsky, Ariel Avgar and James Lamare

An important element in President-Elect Obama’s economic stimulus proposal is his plan to invest a significant proportion of federal dollars in installing electronic medical records (EMR) in U.S. healthcare institutions.  In emphasizing [...]

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Is the Doctor In?  A Relational Approach to Job Design and the Coordination of Work
By Jody Hoffer Gittell, Dana Weinberg, Adrienne Bennett, and Joseph Miller
When designing jobs, the degree of specialization is a key consideration.  Though functional specialization allows workers to develop deep areas of expertise, it also increases the challenges of coordination [...]

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Human Resources Management Aspects of the Hospital Ward Manager’s Job
By Greg J. Bamber, Adrian Wilkinson, Cameron Allan and Keith Townsend
What is the line managers’s role in terms of human resource management?  A new contribution calls for the re-conceptualization of HRM as signals that management send to employees rather than systems, practices or bundles.  That contribution [...]

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Organizational Fragmentation and Care Quality in the U.S. Healthcare System
By Randall D. Cebul, James E. Rebitzer, Lance J. Taylor and Mark E. Votruba
From an organizational perspective, the US health care system is highly fragmented.  Critical tasks in the financing and provision of health care are distributed across a variety of distinct, often competing, [...]

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Collaboration and the Quality of Healthcare Delivery
By Charles Heckscher, Saul Rubinstein, Linda Flynn, Niclas Erhardt and Boniface Michael

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The Impact of Safety Organizing, Trusted Leadership, and Care Pathways on Reported Medication Errors in Hospital Nursing Units
By Timothy J. Vogus and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe

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The Safety Organizing Scale: Development and Validation of a Behavioral Measure of Safety Culture in Hospital Nursing Units
By Timothy J. Vogus and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe

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High Performance Healthcare: Using the Power of Relationships to Achieve Quality, Efficiency and Resilience
By Jody Hoffer Gittell

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Healing Together:  The Kaiser Permanente Labor Management Partnership
By Thomas A. Kochan, Adrienne E. Eaton, Robert B. McKersie, and Paul Adler

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Code Green: Money-Driven Hospitals and the Dismantling of Nursing
by Dana Weinberg

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