Combatting irrationality to promote the positive organization and prevent work-related stress

For "irrationality" in the work domain – as indeed in any context of human experience – we mean the inconsistency and contradiction of the values and goals of an organization with the behaviors and actions that occur within the same organization. This happens, for example, when officially the organization pursues personal merit and innovation, while in reality it rewards above all the employees who reach mid-level standards and limit their behavior to routine tasks (N.A. De Carlo et al. 2016). The objective of this paper is to assess whether irrationality within an organization can drive away the employees from perceiving their organization as positive, characterized by a correct and appropriate workload, as well as by personal growth opportunities, organizational support and social rewards. For the assessment of organizational irrationality we administered the Positive Organization Questionnaire (POQ; 2015) using the items specifically aimed to assess this factor such as, for example, "The organization expects a certain behavior, but in reality it promotes another". For the assessment of the other aforementioned variables we used some of the most widespread scales in the existing literature. Findings of a recent survey carried out in a large group of employees of a public company of the Italian National Health System showed that organizational irrationality correlates positively with the "perception of workload." This means that when organizational behaviors and actions are perceived as irrational, the work activities to be performed tend to be perceived as heavier. In addition, negative correlations emerged between the organizational irrationality and the organizational resources perceived in terms of "growth", "organizational support" and "social rewards." Results suggested that the organizational irrationality might push employees to face a higher level of work-related stress, according to the model of "Effort-Reward Imbalance" (J. Siegrist, 1996). This study also suggests the need to combat the organizational irrationality in order to promote the positive organization and prevent work-related stress.