How Organizations Create Internal Demand for Their Services
Why is there increasing demand for personnel development measures such as coaching and supervision in businesses, public administrations, hospitals, and universities? Can supervision and coaching be understood as reactions to the developments sociologists describe under the headings of the subjectivation of work, the emergence of the entreployee, or deprofessionalisation? Are the mechanisms that businesses, public administrations, hospitals, churches, and social aid organizations use for including their members changing, and is the spread of person-centred consulting in organizations a response to this change?
If we seek an explanation for the growing demand for coaching and supervision in the self-descriptions provided by personnel developers, we find the usual suspects, the same phenomena that are always mentioned whenever organizations reorient themselves: globalization, the internationalization of the organization, the increased use of information and communication technologies, competitive pressures, and also the virtualization of work relations.
In the literature, we find the same line of argument repeated again and again: the conditions under which economic, political, educational, health, and social welfare organizations have to operate have changed, and this means employees are facing different expectations concerning the amount of control they should have over their own activities and the degree of responsibility they should take for their own performance. Independent planning, control, and supervision of one’s own activities, the growing demand for the ‘production’ and ‘marketization’ of one’s own skills and services, and a ‘business-like lifestyle’ that goes along with the disappearance of the division between professional and private life, all this, the argument goes, places new and difficult demands on employees. They find these demands difficult to handle because, while their scope for action and control might be expanding, the pressure to perform is also increasing substantially. This leads to a ‘new kind of need’ for person-centred consulting, which is satisfied by the services of supervisors and coaches.
This line of argument seems plausible, but it involves a simplification. In a society that is often described as ‘complex’, ‘reflexive’, and ‘postmodern’, it is not clear that organizational structures can be causally derived from environmental conditions. Within organization studies, contingency theory, which attempted to find causal explanations for the formation of organizational types, has now lost a lot of plausibility. Nevertheless, even if it is not explicitly mentioned, the theory clearly lurks in the background of explanations of the formation of new consulting approaches. Coaching and supervision are marketed as ways of allowing the employees of businesses, public administrations, professional associations, and other kinds of organization to cope with the increasing demands of their jobs.
A scientific theory that explained the growing demand for person-centred consulting on the basis not just of environmental factors but also of problems created by the organizations themselves would be more convincing. In that case, we might suggest that the demand for radically new personnel development measures is mostly the result of diagnostic tools in personnel management, the use of which has boomed over the past 20 years. It was only as aptitude tests, leadership assessment centres, and 360-degree feedback became more popular that training courses, and especially person-centred consulting by coaches and supervisors, became more attractive. According to this argument, organizations tend to develop personnel development cycles, a kind of ‘all-inclusive service’ for employees, who are provided with the tools of personnel assessment, personnel development measures, and progress assessment.
With the emergence of person-centred management discourses in the 1990s, numerous tools for personnel assessment found their way into businesses – and also into public administrations, hospitals, social welfare and care institutions, and even non-profit organizations. Leadership evaluations, employee appraisals, management audits, aptitude tests, 360-degree feedback, and assessment centres for new talent are all tools for establishing the strengths and weaknesses of an organization’s employees. The main aim, however, is not to test whether an employee is suitable for his or her present position but to collect information on who might be suitable for a position further up the hierarchical ladder.
As a rule, these tools will detect some kind of deficiency. A manager may achieve very good scores on the 360-degree feedback, the anonymized evaluation by subordinates, colleagues, superiors, and sometimes also customers, but there might still be weaknesses in the way he or she works with external bodies. At the assessment centre, an employee may be found to be fully up to his or her present job, but it might also be determined that in many areas there is room for improvement if this employee wants to advance to the next leadership level. Or perhaps a management audit finds that there are weaknesses in the way a firm achieves a balance between the demands of work and private life.
When deficiencies are identified, there are often demands for personnel development measures to rectify them. The personnel development department responds to the perceived deficiencies by combining assessment measures with offers of support in the form of in-house seminars, courses at business schools, mentoring by senior management, advise from colleagues, coaching, or supervision.
The effectiveness of this response, the combination of management assessment and intervention, is then evaluated, allowing the personnel development department to establish whether a particular measure has improved the performance of a team. The performance of a sales representative who received coaching or attended some training course is measured to find out whether there was any improvement. Or a 360-degree feedback is repeated after a series of coaching sessions in order to see whether the employee evaluations have improved.
The entire process, assessment – planning an intervention – intervention – progress evaluation, including reassessment, is called the personnel development cycle. The term ‘cycle’ is meant to indicate that the various assessment, intervention, and evaluation tools are arranged in a circle, and that managers, having finished one round, are more or less automatically fed back into the next cycle. The advantage for personnel development is obvious: it keeps generating demand for the services it provides.
