Organizational interventions to improve wellbeing: a comparison of change processes in different work cultures

Organizational interventions aimed at improving well-being have been widely discussed amongst researchers. It is legitimate to question the effectiveness of interventions, and to seek adequate criterions. It seems all the more important to take the context into account. Indeed, the success of a method also depends on the type of company we intervene in, and on its culture. This raises the question of how we should categorize enterprises in order to find intervention methods that would be adapted to them.
Sociology provides typologies of organizations that could be useful. The cultural approach (Sainsaulieu, 1977; Osty, Uhalde, & Sainsaulieu, 2007) seems to be a good starting point to understand how their characteristics could fit the intervention method we wanted to apply and evaluate. In our case, the intervention method we developed was based on systems thinking (Campbell, Coldicott, & Kinsella, 2011; Jackson, 2000; Althaus et al, 2013). Two business cultures were examined: bureaucratic and entrepreneurial (Osty et al., 2007).