A state hospital's humanistic approach to low employee morale

Abstract

This presentation addresses the problem of low morale of employees in psychiatric delivery services. The article describes an action research project that investigates the low morale of employees at the Osawatomie State Hospital, a state facility for psychiatric disabled citizens in eastern Kansas. Action research goes beyond the cognition causes identified by behavioral methods of many organizational investigations of morale. In this study, data was collected from individual in-depth interviews with a random sample of hospital employees. The employees were encouraged to discuss their reactions toward the negative morale factors that had been identified from an earlier employee morale survey. The outcome of this action research project resulted in organizational changes that provided hospital administrators with a proactive, rather than a reactive approach to employees' concerns.