Supervisor intervention with troubled workers: A social identity perspective

Supervision has evolved from managing and directing workers to supporting workers. Supervisors are key people that workers go to for assistance with personal problems. This article reviews the contributions of various theoretical models to our understanding of supervisor intervention with troubled workers and identifies factors that have been left unexplored in the research. From this analysis, I explain how social identity theory may provide a framework that overcomes many of the limitations of the existing knowledge in this area. Social identity theory has the potential to capture the more personal aspects of the helping process between supervisors and workers that go beyond workers' job performance and productivity, including supervisors' beliefs and attitudes, personal experiences, and social identification with the organization and the work group.