Organisational health (OH) is increasingly recognised as a strategic capability that enables healthcare organisations to remain resilient, adaptive, and sustainable in highly dynamic environments. However, limited research explains how organisations actively manage organisational health through organisational processes and how dynamic capabilities (DC) underpin this process in practice. This study aims to develop an empirically grounded explanation of organisational health management (OHM) by exploring the management practices adopted by healthcare leaders and examining how sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring capabilities interact to sustain OH.
Guided by the DC perspective, this study adopts a qualitative multiple-case design involving 21 healthcare organisations and 46 semi-structured interviews with senior managers. Data were analysed using the Gioia methodology to develop a process-oriented grounded theory that explains the recursive relationships between organisational practices and DC.
The findings reveal that OHM is best understood as a recursive organisational process rather than a collection of isolated management practices. The grounded theory model identifies fifteen empirically derived microfoundations organised into the three DC of sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring. Rather than operating sequentially, these capabilities interact through continuous feedback mechanisms that enable organisations to interpret environmental change, mobilise strategic responses, and continuously renew organisational structures, practices, and capabilities.
This study contributes to OH and DC research by developing a process-based grounded theory of OHM that explains how DC are enacted through interconnected organisational microfoundations in healthcare organisations. Beyond its substantive contribution, the study also shows how the Gioia methodology can move from descriptive thematic analysis to an interpretive, process-oriented theoretical explanation, contributing to qualitative theory building in management and organisation studies.
