Impact of a Major Organizational Change on Employee Productivity and Mental Health

Overview

The study investigates the short- and long-term impact of a major organizational change on employee health and productivity. Changes in organizations is a common aspect of modern work life in all sectors and public healthcare is no exception. However, emerging evidence suggests that organizational changes may be a potential stressor which can impact on employee well-being and contribute to stress-related health problems. Using a large-scale natural experiment, the overall aim of the study is to investigate the impact of a major organizational change that took place during 2016-19 on employee health and productivity. In addition, we aim to identify groups that may be at increased risk of experiencing negative consequences of the reorganization. These at-risk groups can in turn be candidates for extended preventive measures when planning future major organizational changes.

The study relies solely on data from registries and the investigators have taken great care to ensure the validity of these data. Below the main principles and procedures applied are outlined. For the data delivered from the hospital Business Intelligence (BI) database the investigators performed interviews with representatives from each workplace. This was done to ensure that the information about when a workplace underwent the organizational change was accurate, but also what type of organizational change the workplace experienced, how the workplace was organized in terms of departments/wards, and the number of employees at the workplace.The validity of the data supplied by Statistics Denmark relies on the comprehensive procedures to ensure data integrity at Statistics Denmark. All datamanagement by the investigators has been performed in the Stata software package and all decisions are documented in program files (called "do-files" in Stata teminology) to ensure a complete revision trail from the delivered raw data to the dataset used for the final analyses. The investigators have performed extensive data checks, both by tabulations, codebooks, and visual inspection of the data. To ensure against data management errors done by a single investigator when writing the program/do-files, all coding performed in the datamanagement phase has been reviewed by at least one of the other researchers.