The present communication investigates the processes that contribute to develop an organizational mindlessness in health care organizations (HCOs). It identifies, through absenteeism management practices, several mindlessness mechanisms. It explain how they develop and go on without being fixed. The results enrich the literature on failures in HCOs. It proposes that day-to-day work should be brought back in HCOs actors’ minds and talks. Our research aims to contribute to the literature on failures in HCOs from an organizational mindlessness perspective. By the way, it contributes to refinements of HROs and organizational mindfulness literature applied to HCOs’ field. First and foremost, we seek to offer insights into why some expected events, such as absenteeism, remain unmanaged in spite of being widely acknowledged. We focus on organizational mechanisms which lead to a disappearance of operational work as matter of attention. Second, we seek to highlight that the behaviors of each HCOs actors, if individualistically justified, is collectively unproductive and make it harder for each other to achieve organizational awareness. Third, we contribute to the HRO and mindfulness literature which has invested considerable efforts in understanding the operational characteristics and functioning mechanisms of high-risk organizations, but experiments some troubles to extend and apply its knowledge in HCOs. We propose that the loosely-coupled characteristics of HCOs have to be considered as another way to think about reliability and mindfulness. The arguments of this paper imply that development of organizational mindfulness need to be more investigate in such loosely-coupled organizational settings.
