What Needs to Improve and for Whom When We Implement Participatory Organisational Interventions?

Success in participatory organisational interventions is often viewed as improvements in employee wellbeing. In this debate paper, we argue that we need to move beyond relying solely on the scientific evaluation, focusing on improvements in working conditions and employee wellbeing as the criteria for success. We suggest that we also need to explore whether an intervention is seen as a success for, and by, organisational members. Second, we argue that to determine a participatory organisational intervention’s success, we need not only to focus on improved working conditions and employee wellbeing, but we also need to assess whether the participating organisation has developed their change capability, i.e. whether organisational members will be able to continually go through the participatory process and develop solutions for improving working conditions and employee wellbeing. Only if such capability has been developed are we likely to see a sustainable effect of the intervention. We build on sensemaking theory and argue that the participatory process provides stimuli and cues that organisational members translate into cognitive schemata that lead to conclusions about whether the intervention can be viewed as a success or a failure and that such sensemaking processes may be crucial in developing organisational members’ change capability.