Adelphi University Doctoral Program in Clinical Social Work: 1981
Doctoral qualifying paper
James Donnelly, CSW
This paper is an effort directed at presenting the notion of tension as a possible integrating construct in the theoretical consideration of the process of supervision in social work. After a brief review of the more recent literature on supervision in social work, several contributions towards a broader conceptualization of the supervisory process will be considered and their commonalities identified. The concept of tension will be defined and elucidated with the help of General Systems Theory and Role theory. The supervisory process in social work will, then, be considered as a system to understand, manage and direct tension at the interface of many interrelating systems. A suggestion for further research in the area of social work supervision will be made.
Goldstein (1973) in his historical perspective on Social Work pointed to the decade between 1950 and 1960 as the beginning of an intense effort in the profession to define and integrate the various aspects of social work, and to move toward theoretical elaborations which could serve both to unify and clarify Social Work as a profession. One aspect of this effort was a move away from the tendency to over identify social work with its methods looking towards broader conceptualizations generic to all social work activity. From The Working Definition (NASW, 1958) to present efforts at social work theory building, this tendency continues and, as one would expect, is amply reflected in the literature on supervision in social work.
Lucille Austin’s article (1952) more or less epitomizes the traditional model of casework supervision that emphasizes its educational aspects, the tutorial method and the intense relationship between the worker and the supervisor. This is often referred to as the apprenticeship model where the supervision is seen as a major, if not the major instrument for the professional development of the new worker. The supervisor-worker relationship, here, was a modified parallel of the worker-client relationship with a reliance upon psychoanalytic concepts in its discussion. More recent articles in this tradition, although they may introduce a group as well as individual supervisory process still tend to emphasize the developmental and educational aspects of supervision in social work (Allen, 1976; Cherniss, 1978; Feldman, 1977; Foekler, 1970; Gizynasky, 1878; Tucker, 1976).
However, a clash between this traditional model and the increasing thrust toward professionalism in Social Work is evidenced in much of the remaining literature. The apprenticeship model was seen as an anachronistic, de-professionalizing aspect of Social Work. With the increasingly higher numbers of M.S.W. graduates, the position of supervisor as primarily responsible for the professional growth and development of the new worker was challenged. Conflicts around autonomy vs. control (Epstein 1973; Mandell, 1973; Munson, 1976) were aired in the literature along with implications for both supervisor and supervisee (Hawthorne, 1975; Kadushin, 1968). The problem of authority was focused mostly with the supervisee in mind, but Kadushin’s research (1974) into the mutual perceptions of supervisor and supervisee indicated that it wasn’t only the workers who were uncomfortable with the authority of the supervisor.
Another trend, then, filters through the literature; a trend that focused on the organizational: task, work related and administrative aspects of supervision (Arndt, 1973; Berkowitz, 1952; Cohen, 1977; Granvold, 1978a, 1978b; Hey and Rowbottom, 1971; Holcomb, 1956; St. John, 1975; Scherz, 1958). This trend represented a shift from the psychoanalytic to the behavioral and social sciences in their conceptual base. These authors emphasize the task aspect of the job and attempt to define the various responsibilities of the worker and supervisor in that context. Getting the job done well became an, at least, equal partner with the development of the worker as the means to insure good professional service to the client and to society. Workers were seen as primarily responsible for their own professional development and improvement of skills. Accountability, evaluation of performance and the need to understand and relate to the management aspects of the job were stressed with the supervisor.
During the decade of 1950-1960, several authors (Berl, 1960; Berkowitz, 1952; Holcomb, 1956; Scherz, 1958) attempted to define and place the basic elements and aspects of the supervisory process into some kind of over all framework.
1. They represent a shift in focus away from specific methods towards attempts to understand and clarify supervision as a process with many elements. Berl, for example, looks at supervision as “a generic social work operation.”
2. They attempt to conceptually integrate all the various elements of the process without dividing the administrative and educational functions as some authors would (Austin, 1954; Foekler, 1970; Munson, 1979).
3. All address the implementation function of the supervisor as a proper social work activity and reduce the tendency to split the ‘management’ aspects from the ‘professional’. Implementation is defined as “creating conditions”, a “directing and enabling force” (Berkowitz, 1952) helping the professional social worker perform his task (Holcom, 1956).
4. IIn line with the above, there is a shift in emphasis in the role of the supervisor from teacher and overseer to leader and collaborator. The supervisor is seen as an actor, not reactor, to both the agency and the worker. There is a consequent de-emphasis on the supervisor as the “go-between” and more on the role of collaborator with differential responsibility in a common professional task. Berkowitz captures this emphasis in his concept of “administrative leadership”.
5. Perhaps most important and central of the shared characteristics of the supervisory process for these authors is the integrating function of supervision. In their perspective, the function of supervision is to maintain a balance and synthesis between all the various elements in the work of the profession in the setting: the needs of the client, the agency, the organization, the workers, the profession and society. Supervision functions to keep the work experience manageable, to feedback day to day experience into policy and procedure processes and to keep the parts aware of and in functional relationship with the whole (Berl; Holcomb).
6. There is the recognition of the need for a wider knowledge base to inform their profession’s understanding of the supervisory process (Berkowitz) as well as a need to integrate the effort at conceptualizing about the supervisory process with attempts at theory building regarding the profession as a whole (Berl).
Given the fact, then, that the supervisory process functions to integrate and synthesize the work experience in the context of the professional task in a given setting, it is not surprising that it is fraught with potential for conflicts and that tension is a frequent experiential concomitant for all participants. The literature is replete with references, implicit and explicit, to conflict and tension in supervision (Munson, 1976, 1979). Witness the classic dualities: autonomy vs. control and accountability, professional development vs. job requirements, dependence vs. independence, etc. Fern Lowry (1936), in a classic statement on the philosophy of supervision, points to the inevitability of conflict and the need to put it to constructive use in the development of the worker. Kadushin (1976), again in the context of the educational aspects of the supervisory process, favors the maintenance of an optimal balance of tension for effective teaching and learning in supervision. Berl (1960), however, relates tension to the institutional and organizational element of the supervisory process. He enumerates three areas of tension: in the supervisory role, the supervisory function and the supervisory process. He perceives tension to be a key aspect of social functioning and, therefore, central in agency supervision.
Two factors suggest the potential usefulness of tension as a construct around which to integrate the various elements in the supervisory process and to aid in the formulation of a theory of supervisory practice.
In the first place, since tension is an aspect of all the elements in the process, it may well serve to minimize dichotomies apparent in earlier formulations: for example, between management aspects, support aspects and educational aspects. It may also offer an understanding of social conflict that is somewhat less personalized, since tension can be seen as an indicator of transactional as well as interpersonal processes.
Secondly, tension has a direct reference to experience – and the heart of any practice theory is its fidelity to and contact with experience.
Webster defines tension as tautness or as the condition or degree of being stretched. He also relates it to the balancing of opposing forces or elements – a controlled dynamic quality. We may define tension for our purposes as an experience of varying degrees of intensity that serves to indicate the state of a dynamic relationship. The experience of tension in social relationships can be looked at with benefit from two points of view (Watzlawick, P. et al. 1974).
First, it can be seen from the prospective of its occasion. In this perspective, the causal and interpersonal aspects on tension are focused upon.
Secondly, tension can be seen from the prospective of its meaning. In this perspective it is the overall social process that is focused upon; particularly the on going dialectic between structure, process and function in an organization. In this prospective, tension is seen as a systemic rather than an interpersonal concept.
To further elucidate the complexity of the phenomenon of tension, particularly in the supervisory process, let us now turn to Role Theory and a General Systems perspective for concepts that will clarify as well as operationalize the use of tension in social work supervision.
Starting first with the highest level of abstraction, General Systems Theory helps us understand the dynamics of systems per se.
There are many good summaries of General Systems Theory both by social workers and others (Hearn, 1958, 1969; Janchill, 1969; Miller, 1965; Rubin, 1970). What is particularly useful for a consideration of the supervisory process from a systems perspective is the concept of the dynamics of a steady state in an open system. The characteristic of an open system is that it is not totally self-contained or self-sufficient. Its viability and development is consequent to a process of continuous exchange of materials, energy and information across its boundaries. Open systems are negentropic: that is they develop, differentiate and complexify. Maintenance of steady state in the overall system guarantees that the elements remain in functional relationship with each other in the context of a continuous process of change – while maintaining the capacity to continuously process new in-put and transform it into various adaptive responses. The paradigm for this is the maintenance of organic continuity amidst the process of growth and development. One of the most complete descriptions of such a process is Piaget’s (1971) elaboration of the dynamics of cognitive development. Change in this context is more precisely defined as transformation since, as the elements transact, their relationships and structures are mutually altered.
Steady state, then, is a description of consistency amidst continual pressure towards restructuring. It is characterized by a variety of degrees of tension among the various elements. As the functional relationship among the various elements move toward realignment, tension increases and is modified by the capacity of the whole system to alter to remain in balance. If that balance cannot be maintained, the system breaks down and there is no longer a state of tension – which implies patterned relationships – but that of diffuse stress or chaos.
From this perspective, it is not difficult to see the crucial and strategic location of the supervisory system within the context of maintaining a steady state in the overall functioning of social work within a specific organizational care delivery context. Tension, then, has its systemic meaning as a signal and indicator of the location and direction of transformations necessary to maintain steady state under the continuous impact of the mutual exchange process of materials, energy and information between the various sub systems in the overall organizational context.
The supervisory system, however, is a social system and to further specify and operationalize the dynamics of steady state in a social system, it will be useful to turn to a more middle range theory such as Role theory from Sociology.
Merton (1957) defines social role and clarifies its relationship to status. Status is generally considered to be a position in the social system involving designated rights and obligations. Role is understood as behavior oriented to these patterned expectations. Both role and status are implicitly relational, implying reciprocal positions and orientations between members of a social structure. They are meant to link cultural expectations with patterned conduct in relationships that make up a social system.
Role and status are concepts that link behavior with shared meanings.
In all social processes the actors are mutually defined. The balance of tensions of reciprocal meanings and consequent patterns of behavior under the impact of social and cultural change is the sociological manifestation of the dynamics of steady state in an organization.
Merton elaborates this further via his concepts of role-set and social mechanisms. For Merton, a particular status is characterized by an array of roles, the role-set.
The role-set is defined as “…that compliment of role relationships in which persons are involved by virtue of occupying a particular social status.” Therefore, any one person would have in his role-set other persons of varying status and consequent variation in the definition and behavioral expectations vis a vis his own.
Social mechanisms are defined by Merton as social processes that serve to organize, integrate and articulate the expectations and behaviors in the role-set. As meanings in a social context struggle for redefinition, the potential for conflict among the actors is managed by the use of social mechanisms. Role theory, then, helps us understand tension in a social context as a cue and direction regarding which meanings (statuses, roles and consequent behaviors and expectations) are under pressure for redefinition.
Tension in Role theory is further elaborated by Goode (1960) in his concept of role-strain. Briefly stated, role-strain is the felt difficulty in fulfilling role demands and is managed by continuous selection of behaviors designed to reduce strain within the context of the role-set. Role-strain is therefore seen as a function of a complex and continuous balance of forces in a social field. The salient point for our purpose here is that in a social context, meanings are maintained, challenged and redefined by choices of action by actors in the role-set. To attempt to understand the meaning of the tensions in a particular context is to attempt to locate which roles or aspect of roles are under pressure for redefinition under the impact of social forces in the whole field. In other words, Role theory can afford us a way of both conceptualizing and operationalizing the continuous dialectic of meanings in social and individual life in a particular social context.
Status and role are the reflections of the dynamics of steady state in an open system; and tension, or role-strain, is an indicator of the continuous pressure towards the restructuring or revision of social meanings by choice of action.
The obvious implication for the maintenance of a steady state in a social context amidst the continuous revision of roles is that structures must be created to identify, incorporate, understand, manage and utilize tension. The thesis of this paper is that this is precisely the task of the supervisory system and that our review of the social work literature indicates that it has always been so – but, perhaps, not always clearly articulated. (A very striking illustration of the failure of the supervisory system in a public welfare agency is presented by Wasserman (1970).)
Within the framework of the above concepts, the supervisory system continuously operates to incorporate and analyze the systemic meaning of tension rather than simply seek relief from it. Supervision, then, is operationalized as the thought an activity that constructs and maintains the conditions for a transformative process to take place and to continue the maintenance of a steady state in an open system by incorporating and responding to the tensions occasioned by the professional tasks of the worker and the agency in a specific organizational context.
Goode’s presentation of role-strain reduction via the use of social mechanisms in a role-set can point to an approach to the management of role-strain by trying to bring about more adequate expectations and behavioral definitions for all involved in the role-set. The professional social work task is defined primarily by a commitment to values that the social worker attempts to articulate in a particular social context. The tension or role-strain involved and experienced can serve both as an indicator and a motivator for the direction of the worker’s action. His action is primarily a conscious and purposeful attempt to behaviorally redefine roles in a given social context.
Within the context of the professional task, then, the supervisory system relates to the structure maintaining and structure building aspects of social work and, therefore, tension is a central and useful factor. The practice of social work administration on the supervisory level is focused on involving workers in the process of structure building or adjustment via the experience of their tension and the elucidation of its meaning in light of the behavioral definitions of members in the role-set and the professional task. The principle educational focus of the supervisory system, then, would be the training of staff in the identification, understanding and use of tension in the performance of the social work task and the provision of conditions that support following through and implementing strategies of action based upon that information.
The above approach to supervision suggests a strong need for research in the area of role-strain and role conflict in social work supervision. To my knowledge, there are no research studies explicitly focused on role-strain and role conflict in the supervisory process. Here, again, Role theory provides us with an established tradition of research in which many of the variables have been defined operationally. The findings and methods of research in industrial psychology, for example, could be fruitfully applied to a systematic and more precise understanding of the meaning of tension in the practice of social work supervision in specific agency and organizational contexts.
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