Building Cultures and Climates for Effective Human Services ― Understanding and Improving Organizational Social Contexts With the Arc Mode

It is widely acknowledged that many healthcare, behavioral health, and social service organizations provide less-than-optimal services and that the challenge of improving services depends on successfully changing organizational culture and climate. However, there are almost no organizational-level strategies that have been tested with randomized controlled trials. Building Cultures and Climates for Effective Human Services addresses the need for evidence-based organizational strategies for improving human service quality and outcomes by uniquely describing the authors' own case examples, nationwide studies, and randomized controlled trials to explain how organizational culture and climate can be assessed and changed. The two authors use their decades of research and practice experience in assessing and changing human service organizations to explain how organizations can improve the services they provide using the authors' ARC model, which effectively removes service barriers and supports the implementation of evidence-based practices and other innovations. The book also blends case examples with research from nationwide studies, regional experiments, and randomized controlled trials to explain the ARC model of organizational effectiveness and how it works to improve services. It provides a balance between theory, empirical research, and actual case examples to help researchers, organizational consultants, administrators, and service providers gain a practical understanding of how culture and climate affect services and how they can be improved. Furthermore, the text describes the three ARC strategies, each composed of multiple elements, to: (1) embed key organizational principles, (2) implement core organizational component tools, and (3) apply mental models to alter shared reasoning and beliefs that affect success. No other organizational-level strategies for improving services have been so well documented and tested.

Anthony Hemmelgarn, PhD, is an industrial psychologist who has worked with researchers, organizational leaders, and practitioners nationwide to improve organizational cultures, climates, and effectiveness for over two decades. He is a primary co-developer and the lead implementation expert for ARC, an empirically-proven organizational development model that has improved organizational social contexts within human services across the nation, as well as client, staff, and organizational outcomes. He and his colleagues' publications in leading journals have helped shape research, organizational change theory, and organizational strategies to improve cultures and climates within human service organizations. He continues to promote and develop innovative approaches to optimize human services outcomes in healthcare and other human service organizations today.

Charles Glisson, PhD, is currently Chancellor's Professor Emeritus at the University of Tennessee Knoxville and has directed research on human service organizations funded by the National Institutes for Health, W.T. Grant Foundation and other funders for over 40 years. He has authored over one hundred publications on human service organizations and is internationally known for his research on assessing and changing organizational social context to improve human services. He was awarded the NASW Lifetime Achievement Award in Health and Mental Health in 2014.