Networking around Supervisors in an Industrial Corporation

Abstract

This chapter presents a network-level developmental intervention conducted in an industrial corporation. It focuses on production supervisors' changing work and follows how practitioners from the organizational support functions of human resources, occupational safety, and occupational health services build collaboration with supervisors. The notion of “client understanding” provides a starting point for the study: in order to serve supervisors, the support functions need to understand the challenges in the supervisors' operational environment. Results show that attaining client understanding requires, firstly, joint analysis of the sources of the problems and, secondly, the adaptation of dynamic and systemic explanations for them. The study describes the process of how client understanding, in the form of making generalizations, expands during the intervention. The findings have practical relevance for evaluating and developing collaborative practices in networked multi-activity settings.

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