Abstract
Organisational interventions are the recommended approach for improving
employees’ health and wellbeing, but evaluating these complex interventions is
challenging. Realist evaluation is a promising approach for evaluating interventions, it
aims to answer the question of ‘what works for whom in which circumstances?’ by
studying how the mechanisms of an intervention work in a certain context to bring
about certain outcomes in Context-Mechanism-Outcome (CMO) configurations. Based
on realist evaluation, Nielsen and Abildgaard (2013) proposed a five-phase model to
evaluate organisational interventions. We extend the five-phase model to capture more
intervention components and align better with realist evaluation. First, to include
further crucial intervention components to evaluate, we integrate the content of the
REAIM framework into the five-phase model. Second, we provide guidance on when and
how to develop and test CMO configurations for each intervention component. Thus,
we develop an ‘integrated realist evaluation model’. Also, we review the most recent
evidence in the literature regarding each intervention component and develop an
example of a CMO configuration for each component. As such, this article contributes
to the understanding of ‘how to’ evaluate complex organisational interventions that can
be used to design, implement, and evaluate future organisational interventions.