Assignment: Cultural Considerations approaches
Assignment: Cultural Considerations approaches
Assignment: Cultural Considerations approaches
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Discussion 1
Personal Qualities of Group Leaders
Review the personal qualities for group leaders that are described in Chapter 6 of TIP 41: Substance Abuse Treatment: Group Therapy. Choose two of the personal qualities that best reflect your strengths and two that would be most challenging to you. Discuss how these strengths and weaknesses might affect groups you lead.
Discussion 2
Merits of Ethnic Treatment Matching
Choose either article in this units first studies on ethnic matching and take a position weighing the merits of this approach. Based on your readings, would you support placing clients in groups based on the ethnic match between counselor and clients? Provide a clear explanation for your answer.
But an empirical evaluation is not a criterion for the acceptance of such a descriptive approach in the marketplace. Often description (without empirical evaluation) in the social sciences is accepted by consumers as equivalent to explanation. Management fads come and go and neither OD nor OBM can claim the current spotlight in this arena. Although organizational culture received a great deal of attention in the 1980s, the shift is now toward organizational learning and continuous improvement and related efforts. A metacontingency that encompasses all of these trends or fads is the globalization of the marketplace under conditions of diminished worldwide resources and overpopulation. Clearly, these are challenging times and we need to constantly reexamine the extent to which our technology is serving to enhance the human condition. An overriding implication is that marketability of an organizational change technology cannot be considered as a benchmark of success for either OBM or OD.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
The points made here describe important ways in which OBM and OD may reciprocate in developing change technologies that address the challenges of these crucial times for organizations. Behavior analysts are rapidly adopting many of these suggestions and are improving the acceptance by management of behavioral methods (cf. Redmon, 1992). OBM is truly expanding its focus to wide-scale system change. Witness the recent issue of Journal of Organizational Behavior Management (Mawhinney, 1992) devoted to organizational culture and rule-governed behavior. The edited book on behavioral analyses of culture by Lamal (1991) is also an important contribution to this expanded focus by behavior analysts.
