An Exploration of Occupational Role: An Exercise in Team Development

The manager of a small group of professional valuers within a Local Authority expressed concern about the inconsistent, and often conflicting, ways in which his officers described situations. In particular he was worried about the varying emphases and content of reports he received from different officers where they had been addressing issues he believed to be similar. While it is clear there are a large number of possible explanations for the phenomenon, the manager concerned, and ourselves, became interested in the extent to which the officers might be attributing significantly different meanings to the situations they experienced. Our own interest was excited by the opportunity to experiment with a field application of grid techniques where the deliberate intention was to provide a vehicle for team development set within the context of the problem the manager has defined. Discussion with the eleven members of the department both reinforced our belief that it might be valuable to conduct an analysis of meanings and also provide an opportunity to negotiate our intervention and the prospect of team involvement after the elicitation and analysis of the grids.