Ritva Ruponen & Marjatta Vanhalakka-Ruoho
GROUP COUNSELLING IN ENHANCING AGENCY AT WORK:
THE CASE OF IT-PROFESSIONALS
Career guidance and development practices around the world
Cape Town South Africa
19-21 October 2011
University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu
Campus (15,000 degree students – 2,700 staff
members – 4 faculties)
STARTING POINTS
We are developing one methodological approach
to evaluate the outcomes of group counselling.
This study is part of a more extensive research project entitled
’Group counselling in encountering uncertainty and changes.
Navigating forward’
STARTING POINTS
Our study is connected with the issues of work place counselling.
In this study a group counselling trial was carried out
in an IT enterprise.
The central model is the structured group counselling model
(Borgen et al. 1989).
•
clearly defined goals
•
flexible design
•
a framework promoting learning
•
a diversity of learning activities.
SOME THEORETICAL FRAMES
Agency
The core essence of agency is seen to be related
to the individual’s ability to choose and direct
their own actions according to their choices
(e.g. Richardson 2004; Gergen 2009).
Socio-cultural models stress that the individual’s
intentions and desires are not only found in
their minds, but they must be understood
in a multiplicity of contexts in regard to others
and environments.
SOME THEORETICAL FRAMES
Relationality
Life-designing of individuals occurs in relation to and negotiation
with significant others both nearby and distant.
Individuals are also viewed relationally as acting and connected
to the bonds, opportunities and limitations of the cultural and
social environment (Schultheiss 2007; Savickas et al. 2010).
In work contexts relationality is discussed in many terms:
it is a question of joint action, shared expertise and collective
action.
SOME THEORETICAL FRAMES
Dialogicality
Human action is understood in interactive relations and the
construction of agency is seen as reciprocal.
The individual’s action is analyzed as positioned relations
to the self, other persons as well as objects and situations,
and as the development of these positioned relations
(Leiman 2007, 2008).
The focus is on
•
the development of reflective self-observation
•
movements generated in the subject and object positions
(location of agency; being a subject or an object )
The key question:
How to evaluate the outcomes of group
counselling?
RESEARCH DESIGN
The research task is to clarify what workers receive both individually
and collectively from group counselling for their agency at work.
• What incentives has the group counselling trial given the
participants to develop their agency at work?
• How can these changes be analyzed dialogically as situationally
bound and relationally associated processes?
RESEARCH DESIGN
The goal of the trial was to help the workers recognize
their own work methods and develop their strengths and
work methods amid changes in and challenges to their competence.
Group counselling was effectuated according to the
five session and one follow-up (5 + 1) model.
Pre-group tasks and intermediate tasks were included
in the counselling process.
The researchers also served as group counsellors.
An example of the design
2nd session
Opening of session
Joint work chart
Zooming in on teamwork chart:
chat groups
Individual relation to work: pair work
Intermediate task for the next session: Mapping my experiences
of learning and success
Summary of session. Thoughts for next time.
RESEARCH DESIGN
Participants
Half of the enterprise’s personnel participated in the group counselling
trial; 12-14 people were present at different sessions.
Male-dominated workplace: One female employee present.
Methods
Email-questionnaire prior to beginning
The notes of the counselors and the materials (charts) produced
by the participants in the group sessions were collected.
The main data were collected by interviews (n=11) some weeks
after the last session.
RESEARCH DESIGN
Analysis of interview data:
The subject of the analysis is verbal expressions and relational
speech
The interview material was analyzed on two levels.
• The first stage was a group-level analysis. It examined the changes
the participants described in respect to group counselling, teamwork
and their own work.
• The second level analyzed individual changes. The subject of this
analysis was individual self-observations, action patterns and
changes in them.
A solution to the key question?
In this second stage of the analysis some principles of
dialogical sequence analysis (DSA) (Leiman & Stiles) are
applied to the participants’ self-observations and action
patterns and changes in them
The distinctive feature is the use of an individualised
formulation of the self-observations, action patterns and
the recurring positions.
Interest focuses on how the experiences from group
counselling process are expressed, how self-observation
occurs and which subject and object positional moves are
observed.
Some reservations…..
The analysis conditions differ from the original use of DSA in
that the materials do not come from the counselling process
itself but the participants reflect retrospectively (one month
later) on their experiences of group counselling and their
significance at work.
RESULTS
The results from the group level analysis showed e.g.
In regard to group counselling
Experience of teamwork
Opportunity to observe the perspective of others
Possibility of open discussion
Expressing problems
Possibility to voice their own ideas and views
Stimulation of new methods of perceiving “the actions of others”
but also
Handling of joint familiar problems
RESULTS
But we focus on the results of the second level of analysis:
• how the participants reflected on the group counselling process and
work processes,
• what kind of qualitative changes occurred the in area of selfobservation and
• how movements are generated in the subject and object positions., i.e
in the location of agency; being a subject or an object
RESULTS
Three different patterns of changes are presented which
are, at the same time, both individual and relational.
The descriptions are based on interviews of three key
informants.
These development courses differ when they are
examined from the perspectives of shade of selfobservation, field of self-observation and the location of
agency.
RESULTS
Course of
Shade of self-
Expansion of
Subject/object
development
observation
perspectives
position
Progressive
actively stimulating widening, analytic
renewed/reinforced
subject position
Skeptical
Dissociated
stimulating and
widening,
changing subject and
skeptical
vacillating
object position
stimulating and
widening,
disengaging
vanishing
disappearing
RESULTS
Progressive
H4:41-44: Well probably something like that if you’d try to take others
into account more, and also see things from their viewpoints and see
the bigger picture too. At least something like that would be a good
goal.
H4: 127-131. At least people all got something to think from the other
people’s viewpoints, which is a good thing, and then they can also
identify with the others’ work and can in the future hopefully look at
things from a distance, and through that get a different picture of
situations. That’s what I hope for and that would remain with the
whole group that took part there..
RESULTS
Skeptical
H6:38-46:Well, there hasn’t really been any
improvement seen in these work procedures, more
like that I don’t really know, can you really increase
team work in certain circumstances at all. Of course
if there is some bigger project like this that you take
part in and in a situation like that, but I have a lot
of projects that I work on my own on, and there is
no bigger group that would do the same work, so
there hasn’t been any concrete improvements yet.
RESULTS
Dissociated
But to be honest I don’t really know, but this starts from
the CEO level, so why hasn’t this been brought up that we
should make these responsibilities clearer in different
fields of products and then get some sort of clarity in
these different projects. Now there are too much different
kinds of work at the moment and that’s pretty confusing,
and then it came up that people, good useful people, tend
to get a bit stressed when there’s always someone pushing
you do this and do that and for the sake of this work it
should be clearer that certain people take care of certain
things, instead of just this running around.
DISCUSSION
Group counselling
enabled the expansion of viewpoints and perspectives
created opportunities of sharing
widened the possibilities to see “otherness”
led to reflective considerations
-> These are among the basic group counselling goals
DISCUSSION
Challenges of group counselling
• how to support the progressive processes afterwards
• how to deal with the skepticism during the process and
afterwards
• how to prevent dissociation between the process and the daily
life afterwards
DISCUSSION
Evaluating the outcomes of group counselling:
Agency, relationality and dialogicality are promising theoretical
tools
This was a preliminary ’sketch’, we have to develop our
methodological solutions further
The depicted courses of development are individual, but at the
same time they are relational
Outcomes have to be analyzed as meaning-making that is
situationally bound and related to individual and collective
proximal zones of development.
•
the participant’s life- and work situation
•
the everyday work and the character of expert work
•
the operational culture of the enterprise.
References e.g.
Borgen, W.A., Pollard D.E., Amundson, N.E. & Westwood, M.J. (1989). Employment groups: the
counseling connection. Toronto: Lugus.
Gergen, K.J. (2009) Relational being: beyond self and community. New York: Oxford University Press.
Leiman, M. (2007). Dialoginen ohjaus ja neuvonta. Julkaisussa Tuetusta toimijuudesta itsenäiseen
toimijuuteen. Dialoginen ohjaus ja neuvonta käytännössä. Optio työelämään-projekti,9-27.
Leiman, M. (2008). Kognitiivis-analyyttinen näkökulma. Teoksessa S. Kähkönen, I.Karila & N. Holmberg
(toim.) Kognitiivinen psykoterapia. Helsinki. Duodecim, 495-509.
Leiman, M. & Stiles, W.B. (2001). Dialogical sequence analysis and the zone of proximal development as
conceptual enhancements to the assimilation model: The case of Jan revisited. Psychotherapy
Research, 11(3), 311-330.
Richardson, M.S. (2004). The emergence of new intentions in subjective experience: A social/personal
constructionist and relational understanding. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 64, 485-498.
Savickas, M., Nota, L., Rossier, J., Dauwalder, J-P., Duarte, M.E., Guichard, J., Soresi, S., Van Esbroeck R.
& van Vianen, A.E.M. (2009). Life designing: A paradigm for career construction in the 21st century.
Journal of Vocational Behavior 75(3), 239─250.
Schultheiss, D.E. (2007). The emergence of a relational cultural paradigm for vocational psychology.
Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance 7(3), 145─147.
Thank You for your attention!
Email: marjatta.vanhalakka-ruoho@uef.fi