Co-creating organizational welfare through action-research: Insights from the case of a social cooperative

Based on co-creation theory, the value of any human resource (HR) practice is defined by any stakeholder who uses it; hence, to maximize its value, HR practices should be co-created by HR and users. However, when it comes to organizational welfare, in most of the cases, decision-makers rely on standardized processes and workers are involved mainly in terms of needs-analysis through standardized tools resulting in less incisive choices and policies. The current work takes on the challenge to apply action-research (AR) in the field of organizational welfare and show how AR can be used as a valuable methodological approach to sustain the co-creation of more relevant organizational welfare choices. We worked in collaboration with an Italian social cooperative with the purpose to adjust its representations and practices around organizational welfare through organizational actors’ participation. Results showed that AR allowed a complex welfare picture to be built, supporting awareness around several priorities from the bottom that would have otherwise remained invisible: the need to define an operational direction and the identification of a dedicated role to coordinate the process; development of a context-based welfare-need questionnaire. Our findings support the contribution of AR to the co-creation process of more effective HR practices.