Chapter 13: Socio-Economic Intervention as Integrated Training Action for Intermediate Supervisory Staff

Most management consultant interventions give little consideration to intermediate supervisory staff (International Labor Organization, 1998). Indeed, when interventions address the enterprise’s general organization and strategy, the intermediate supervisory staff itself is typically not explicitly taken into consideration, but is merely expected to implement and adapt to decisions made at the summit (Dopson, 1992). Such is the case when, for example, a “process reconfiguration” intervention (or “reengineering”) leads to grouping together activities from different divisions of the enterprise, provoking modifications in the number and composition of intermediate supervisory teams. In other instances, an intervention may concentrate on one of the enterprise’s divisions, for example seeking to improve the productivity of a department or a project team (Kotter, 1996). The intervention substitutes itself for the intermediate supervisory staff, which has been either ignored or possibly even deemed incompetent to conceive and implement organizational change (Mintzberg, 1989; Simon & March, 1958). It can also be observed that interventions destined to impact the entire enterprise, as is the case with total quality and quality certification initiatives, rely more on the enterprise’s senior level management and its core staff than on its intermediate supervisory staff (Lawler, 1986), often considered to be more of an obstacle to improvement initiatives than a motor for change (Coch & French, 1949). ‘