Leading the healthy workforce: The integral role of employee involvement.

Managers and organizational leaders are continuously looking for ways to position their organizations for success. A recent trend among practitioners has focused on creating a healthy workplace, resulting in numerous contrasting prescriptive approaches toward achieving organizational health. Rather than advocating a particular approach to a healthy workplace, this article focuses on the need for practitioners to design healthy workplace programs, policies, and practices that fit the specific context of an organization. To do this, the authors propose that employee involvement, though seldom emphasized in discussions of a healthy workplace, is critical to the success of new initiatives. Employee involvement relies on the human capital of an organization to improve organizational functioning. Providing examples from organizations that have recently been recognized for their comprehensive efforts to create a healthy workplace, this article describes ways of fostering employee involvement, recognizing that all organizations, for-profit and not-for-profit, large and small, can use employee involvement to identify high-leverage practices that will have a mutual benefit for employees and organizations. Four major barriers to implementing employee involvement practices are discussed, along with implications for consulting psychology.