Organizational Counseling Interventions and Organizational Development
What follows is intended to clarify the mutual distinctions and complementarity of traditional Organizational Development (OD) services, such as those provided by UCSF’s Development & Training unit, and Organizational Counseling Interventions (OCI) such as those offered by UCSF’s FSAP unit.
- In appreciating this distinction, it is essential to place EAP OCI services in their proper historical context.
- Employee Assistance Programs have been in existence for more than 50 years. Although their earliest focus was to identify, intervene with, and assist alcoholic employees, they have evolved continuously and considerably since then.
- The first major expansion of EAP Core Technology was to encompass the entire range of psychological and behavioral problems experienced by individual employees.
- More than 20 years ago, EAP Core Technology ? in response to the needs and demands of the organizations being served ? expanded again to encompass interventions at the group level: administrative staffs, departmental workgroups/units and entire departments, faculties (at academic institutions), and clinical teams (at medical institutions).
- This consultative aspect of EAP Core Technology is listed as one of the essential components of the employee assistance profession. The Employee Assistance Professionals Association (EAPA) describes it as follows:
- Consultation with, training of, and assistance to work organization leadership (managers, supervisors, and union stewards) seeking to manage the troubled employee, enhance the work environment, and improve employee job performance, and outreach to and education of employees and their family members about availability of EAP service.
- Additionally, EAPA includes in its listing of Direct Services the following:
Consultation With Organization Leadership: The employee assistance program shall provide individual consultation to organization leadership regarding the management and referral to the employee assistance program of employees with job performance or behavioral/medical problems.
- Organizational Consultation: The employee assistance program shall provide consultation to the organization regarding issues, policies, practices, and events that may impact employee well-being.
- In summary, the Core Technology of EAPs has long since evolved from a focus on the individual employee to include interventions at every level of the organizations they serve. This expanded scope of services is practiced by EAPs throughout the UC and CSU systems, as well as by other major universities such as Harvard, Stanford and Johns Hopkins.
- The expansion of EAP Core Technology over the past 50 years reflects and parallels a development within Psychology as a discipline, from exclusive focus on the individual to the embrace of a systems view of human groups (families, nations, sub-cultures, commercial and academic organizations, etc.).
- Within the systems perspective, the individual is understood to exist within a larger network of relationships; in fact, every individual exists within multiple, interlocking systems of relationship.
- From the systems perspective, while some problems may be dealt with more or less successfully in terms of the isolated individual, the great majority of problems exist within a context of relationships and thus cannot be resolved apart from the larger whole within which the individual lives and works.
- Organizational Development (OD) and Organizational Counseling Interventions (OCI) are two natural extensions of systems thinking within the larger discipline of Psychology.
- Given the fact that OD and OCI technologies have a common origin within Psychology as a discipline, and the development of the systems perspective in particular, it is necessary to identify the core distinctions between these two approaches to serving the organization:
- Group > Individuals vs. Individuals > Group Interventions: In general, OD interventions address and work with the group (department, staff, faculty, etc.) as a whole, within which individual employees function in various capacities; their focus is on how the larger whole can be altered, restructured, or otherwise improved. These interventions are designed to improve overall organizational health and effectiveness, which in turn improve the working conditions of individual employees. In contrast, OCI interventions primarily address the individual employees who may be suffering from a variety of intrapsychic or interpersonal problems, which in turn affect the larger group or department within which they work. While these interventions are made with the larger system of relationships in mind, they are generally brought about because a manager, supervisor, faculty chair, etc., perceives a problem with one or more individuals within their group or department.
- (Psychological) Functionality vs. Dysfunctionality: In general, OD interventions are made in response to organizational units experiencing change, needing to resolve problems in productivity, or where there are performance issues related to workplace climate, employee morale, skill level, use of technology, etc., but where what is at issue is the normal functionality of the department, not the (psychological) dysfunctionality of the individuals within it. On the other hand, OCI interventions assume, and are appropriate in cases where the presenting problem is abnormal behavior, psychiatric symptoms, or stress-induced dysfunctionality of whatever kind. These problems may be primarily personal (such as a substance abuse problem or depression), or primarily interpersonal (such as personality conflicts, aggression and chronic antagonism, or habitual disrespect) ? either way, they also have an adverse impact on the functionality of the group as a whole.
- Some of the typical areas of focus and expertise where OD and OCI differ are listed below, and these may be used as decision-making criteria when it comes to deciding whether a management request for intervention should be referred to D&T or to FSAP.
| Organizational Development | Organizational Counseling |
| Leadership development | Personality dysfunction (substance abuse, psychiatric symptoms, etc.) |
| Departmental (re)organization | Stress/Change Management |
| Poor Morale | Grief reaction to loss or death |
| Group retreats | Critical Incident Stress Management |
| Skills development and technology usage | Employee/patient safety issues |
| Team - building | Communication breakdown within teams |
| Workplace climate | Entrenched interpersonal conflict |
| Promoting improved/increased organizational performance | Promoting organizational wellness |