PSY 620 Module 3 Organizational Consultation Example

When the Problem Is the System: Organizational Consultation on a School's Rising Office Referrals

Student Name

Psychology and Addiction Studies Program, Aspen University

PSY 620: Psychological Interactions

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

When the Problem Is the System: Organizational Consultation on a School's Rising Office Referrals

After six weeks of consultation on one third grader's behavior at Desert Willow Elementary, a Tucson school invented for this course, the principal asked Leah, the composite consultant, for something larger. Office referrals across the school had doubled compared with the year before. Teachers were frustrated, and several had told the principal that "kids these days" were the problem. The principal wanted a recommendation for a school-wide discipline program by winter break. This paper considers how Leah should approach the school as an organization.

From Case to Organization

In case consultation, the client is a child and the consultee a teacher. In organizational consultation, the client is the organization, or a part of it, and the consultees are the people who run it. The problem is not one child's behavior but a pattern produced by how the school works: its policies, routines, leadership, culture and climate. Solutions likewise lie in the organization's practices rather than in any one classroom.

Diagnosing With a Model

Burke and Litwin (1992) offered a model that traces how changes in one part of an organization drive changes in others and, ultimately, in its performance. They distinguished transformational factors, which require new behavior and usually change slowly, such as the pressures from outside, the organization's purpose and strategy, its leaders and its culture, from transactional factors, which concern everyday operations, including structure, management practices, systems such as policies and procedures, work unit climate, task requirements, individual needs and values and motivation. Transformational factors shape transactional ones, and all affect individual and organizational performance. The model helps a consultant ask where a problem originates rather than treating its symptom.

Leah began by asking the school's data clerk for the past two years of referral records, stripped of student names, and by holding brief listening sessions with teachers, staff and the principal.

A Process Consultation Stance

Schein (1999) distinguished three models of helping. In the purchase-of-expertise model, the client defines the problem and buys a solution. In the doctor-patient model, the consultant diagnoses and prescribes. In process consultation, the consultant helps the client perceive, understand and act on the processes in their own organization, and the client keeps ownership of both the problem and the solution. Schein argued that process consultation is often the better starting point, because the client knows the organization better than any consultant and because solutions the client develops are more likely to be carried out.

The principal's request fit the purchase-of-expertise model: buy a program. Leah proposed instead to help the school's staff examine their own referral data and decide what to change. She explained that she might later recommend specific practices, but that a program chosen before the school understood its own pattern might not fit it.

What Research Says About Change

Armenakis and Bedeian (1999) surveyed the change research of the 1990s and sorted it under four headings: content, what is changed; context, the internal and external conditions; process, how change is carried out; and criteria, how outcomes are judged. Among their conclusions was that attention to process, including staff readiness, participation and communication, is as important as choosing the right content. Changes imposed without readiness or involvement often met resistance or faded.

For Desert Willow, the research argued for building readiness before choosing content. Teachers who believed the problem was "kids these days" were unlikely to embrace a new program unless they first saw for themselves what the data showed.

The Plan

Leah proposed a three-month plan. First, a working group of six staff, including teachers from the most affected grades, the assistant principal and a counselor, would meet every two weeks to analyze referral data with Leah's help, asking when, where and for what referrals occurred. Second, the group would agree on a shared definition of which behaviors warrant a referral and which are handled in class. Third, it would choose one or two changes to test, such as restoring afternoon recess for the affected grades or adding support in the overcrowded classes. Fourth, it would set criteria for judging success, such as referrals per month by grade and teachers' ratings of support. The principal would receive updates from the working group, not from Leah alone. Leah would attend the group's meetings as a facilitator, helping it read the data and keep to its questions, while the decisions would be the group's own.

Managing the Principal's Expectations

The principal wanted a program by winter break, and process consultation is slower. Leah addressed the gap directly. She explained that the working group would produce a first change to test within six weeks, well before the break, and that a program adopted without understanding the referral pattern risked costing money and staff goodwill without reducing referrals. She also offered to bring the working group's findings to a staff meeting, so the principal could see progress. The principal agreed to the plan on condition that she would receive a written summary each month.

What Leah Does Not Know

The diagnosis rests on two years of records and listening sessions. It may miss students' and families' perspectives, which the working group should seek. It may also miss tensions among staff that people were reluctant to raise in a session the principal arranged. Process consultation leaves room for these to surface as the group works.

Conclusion

Organizational consultation treats the school, not one child, as the client. Burke and Litwin's model helped Leah trace rising referrals to changes in environment, leadership, systems and climate. Schein's process consultation keeps the problem and its solution with the school's staff, and Armenakis and Bedeian's review explains why readiness and participation matter as much as the content of change. The plan builds both.

References

Armenakis, A. A., & Bedeian, A. G. (1999). Organizational change: A review of theory and research in the 1990s. Journal of Management, 25(3), 293-315. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639902500303

Burke, W. W., & Litwin, G. H. (1992). A causal model of organizational performance and change. Journal of Management, 18(3), 523-545. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639201800306

Schein, E. H. (1999). Process consultation revisited: Building the helping relationship. Addison-Wesley.