Transforming Relationships for High Performance: A Relational Model of Organisational Change

AHWI has been awarded an International Visiting Fellowship by the Australian Primary Health Care Research Institute (APHCRI) to host Professor Jody Hoffer Gittell, Professor of Management at Brandeis University's Heller School for Social Policy and Management, and Acting Faculty Director of the MIT Leadership MIT Leadership Centre.

Context

Health and human service organisations face a challenging economic environment, with increasing pressures to reduce their costs while improving the quality of their outcomes.  Yet many of these organisations are structured as traditional bureaucracies with employees working in silos, producing poor quality outcomes at high cost. Existing theory suggests that organisational structures can be transformed to support the development of relational coordination, connecting employees across areas of functional specialisation, with positive implications for quality, efficiency, and employee well-being.  But existing theory also suggests that relational behaviours are deeply engrained in organisational cultures and professional identities, inhibiting the ability to learn new ways to coordinate.

Theory of Relational Coordination

Professor Gittell has explored how coordination by front-line workers contributes to quality and efficiency outcomes in service settings, with a particular focus on the airline and health care industries.  She has developed a theory of Relational Coordination, proposing that work is most effectively coordinated through relationships of shared goals, shared knowledge and mutual respect, and demonstrating how organisations can support relational coordination through the design of high performance work systems.  Developed and tested in the context of air travel, surgical care and long term care, relational coordination theory is expected to generalise to work processes in which multiple providers are engaged in carrying out highly interdependent tasks under conditions of uncertainty and time constraints.  Within the healthcare context, relational coordination has a significant positive impact on key measures of performance, including both quality and efficiency.

Professor Gittell uses live case studies in health and human service organisations to develop a relational model of organisational change.  The model suggests that learning to coordinate requires three types of interventions - relational, work process, and structural.  

• Relational interventions include fostering psychological safety, mapping and reflecting upon current relationship patterns, and coaching/role-modeling new relationship patterns.
• Work process interventions include mapping current work processes, clarifying roles, identifying goals, and engaging in problem solving.
• Structural interventions include redesigning rewards, performance measures, selection, training, conflict resolution, meetings, protocols and information systems to reinforce new ways of coordinating work.

Top leadership support is shown to be essential for this relational model of organisational change to produce sustainable changes in performance.

Key Publications

• “Learning to Coordinate - A Relational Model of Organizational Change” by Jody Hoffer Gittell, Amy Edmondson and Edgar Schein.
• “Relational Coordination: Guidelines for Theory, Measurement and Analysis”, by Jody Hoffer Gittell (updated May 1, 2011).
• “New Directions for Relational Coordination Theory,” by Jody Hoffer Gittell, in Oxford Handbook of Positive Organizational Scholarship, eds. K.S. Cameron and G. Spreitzer. Oxford University Press (2011).
• “A Relational Model Of How High-Performance Work Systems Work,” by Jody Hoffer Gittell, Rob Seidner, and Julian Wimbush, Organization Science, 21(2): 490-506 (2010).
• “Up in the Air: How Airlines Can Improve Performance by Engaging their Employees” by Greg J Bamber, Jody Hoffer Gittell, Tom Kochan and Andrew von Nordenflytch, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New Yorkwww.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100965480
• “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, Human Resource Management, 47(4): 729-755 (2008).
• “Impact of Relational Coordination on Job Satisfaction and Quality of Care: A Study of Nursing Homes,” by Jody Hoffer Gittell, Dana Weinberg, Susan Pfefferle and Christine Bishop, Human Resource Management Journal, 18(2): 154-170 (2008).

Relational Coordination Research Collaborative

Professor Gittell recently launched the Relational Coordination Research Collaborative (RCRC).  http://www.relationalcoordination.org in the United States. The RCRC’s MISSION IS TO TRANSFORM RELATIONSHIPS for high performance by building shared goals, shared knowledge and mutual respect across boundaries. We connect with practitioners and academics in an innovative, collaborative setting to develop and test new models of change. Together we help organisations improve the relational dynamics underlying their work processes and redesign their structures to support and sustain new dynamics.  RCRC Partners are from Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, Canada, UK, Italy, and Norway. The opportunity exists for Australian organisations, professionals, academics and students to partner with the RCRC.

 APHCRI International Visiting Fellowship

Professor Gittell's visit is intended to contribute to understanding how to build high performing work systems that foster relational coordination across multidisciplinary primary health care team approaches, especially as the Australian government has committed to funding Medicare Locals across Australia to improve the planning and coordination of PHC services.

The APHCRI International Visiting Fellowship application for Dr Jody Hoffer Gittell is a collaboration between: Dr Lucio Naccarella (The Australian health Workforce Institute, The University of Melbourne); Professor Greg Bamber (Department of Management, Monash University) and David Burns (Affinity Organisational Development Pty Ltd.)

To register for your free place at this lecture, please email Rebecca Gracey rgracey@unimelb.edu.au