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Communication and job satisfaction are two key factors for the success of public organisations. The study aims, firstly, to examine the effects of training activities and internal meetings on the perceived quality of communication processes; secondly, to explore the nuanced relationship between communication and job satisfaction.

This is a cross-sectional study based on results from organisational climate surveys conducted between 2019 and 2020 in six Italian Regional Healthcare Systems, involving a total of 58,888 employees. Linear regression models were performed.

Results highlight that employee satisfaction is positively influenced by high-quality internal communication. The organisation of frequent internal meetings and the offer of ad hoc training sessions on communication were found to be antecedents of good communication.

The study offers practical implications for healthcare organisations, highlighting specific strategies that can be employed to enhance internal communication and, subsequently, job satisfaction. The emphasis on training programmes and internal meetings provides actionable insights for organisational improvement.

The originality and value of this study lie in its unique large datasets, which significantly strengthen the reliability of the findings and make them more applicable to a wider range of contexts. Also, the exploration of the relationship between internal communication processes and job satisfaction within public healthcare organisations contributes to the growing body of knowledge in organisational studies.

As subjects irrationally perceive probability changes as more impactful when shifting an event from impossible to possible or from possible to certain, compared to increasing the likelihood of an already possible event, this study examines how workers process success probabilities and whether their resource allocation decisions are distorted by bounded subadditivity.

We conduct an online randomized experiment with 3,980 employees.

We detect a certainty effect (upper subadditivity), whereby professionals are willing to devote a disproportionate number of hours to a project when their contribution transforms the success of the initiative from possible to certain rather than increasing the likelihood of success by the same percentage points. We find no evidence of the possibility effect (lower subadditivity), whereby workers would devote a disproportionate effort when their contribution turns a sure failure into a possible success rather than simply increasing the likelihood of success by the same percentage points. We observe a rational tendency to try harder for a greater increase in the probability of success, but only far from the limits of the probability spectrum and not close to the limits.

Attempts to understand bounded subadditivity in management decisions have been incomplete. We disentangle two real-world variables and offer a more refined operationalization.