Human Resources Evaluation System in the Healthcare Setting: A Qualitative Study in Italy

Abstract

In the last thirty years, many reforms have deeply changed the organizational and managerial models adopted in the Italian healthcare system with the increasing adoption of different rules focused on the efficiency and effectiveness standards in the resources allocation. As a consequence, public and private healthcare organizations pay more and more attention to their human resources by searching and implementing different policies aimed to promote, develop and withhold employees with high skills and competences. In this direction, scholars and practitioners significantly and increasingly tend to focus on the evaluation system topic by trying to find the most effective models able to make the employees’ performance successful. This paper analyzes the impact of the assessment policies adopted by the organizations on the employees’ performance. In this study some relevant factors have been considered, such as the perception of equity by the employees (the concrete care providers), the leadership style, and the perception of wellbeing by the same employees within organizations. This is an exploratory study conducted through a qualitative approach by using a case study methodology. This research is grounded on an in-depth investigation of the private clinic case in the Centre-Southern Italy. This study can extend the previous theoretical and empirical contributions on the evaluation system within healthcare organizations thanks to the adoption of a wide analysis perspective, allowing to focus on aspects usually underrepresented in the existing literature, such as the perception of equity, the level of wellbeing at workplace, and the relational leadership.