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What are the implications of virtualisation for building trust during the management consultancy lifecycle? (pag 38)
Abstract
Covid-19 forced management consultants to deliver their services online, a trend that is unlikely to stop completely after the pandemic. For provision to be more successful, working virtually or offering a combination of virtual and face-to-face delivery will be needed. Using mixed research methods, this paper explores the implications of the use of virtual communication and collaboration tools on building trust throughout a consulting lifecycle. Based on the analysis, this paper argues that face-to-face interaction is key to creating an emotional connection, but other factors reduce the need for it, such as other trust-building elements, types of services and tasks in various stages as well as the level of knowledge and familiarity with the tools. Drivers of further virtualisation and skills required for online delivery are identified.
... : échanges de regards) peut entraver la lecture des dynamiques relationnelles (Cooper et Neal, 2015). L'animation de groupe est également di érente à distance, les expressions faciales et les invitations de la main ne su sant plus pour susciter ou réfréner la participation (Collina, 2021). ...
... : règles non écrites; Schein, 2009), ce construit devient plus di cile à saisir à distance (Daum et Maraist, 2021). Également, le diagnostic organisationnel se voit complexi é par l'impossibilité de s'imprégner de l'atmosphère des lieux et de prendre part aux conversations informelles (Collina, 2021). En n, alors que plusieurs organisations redé nissent actuellement leurs modes de travail (Clay, 2022), les praticiens auront à considérer la compatibilité des modalités avec les normes en place. ...
... En n, alors que plusieurs organisations redé nissent actuellement leurs modes de travail (Clay, 2022), les praticiens auront à considérer la compatibilité des modalités avec les normes en place. : Miro) peut s'avérer fort utile a n de favoriser une compréhension commune et de susciter la participation (Collina, 2021 (Payne et al., 2020). En ce qui concerne l'établissement du rapport, van Coller-Peter et Manzini (2020) soulignent l'importance des stratégies de présentation de soi communiquant l'authenticité, où l'humour et le dévoilement de soi (de façon dosée) peuvent avoir leur place. ...
In this theoretical paper, we propose a critical review of the implications of telepratice in the field of industrial-organizational psychology focusing on matters of effectiveness, working alliance and skills development.
... The immediate goal for consultants is to build a solid client-consultant relationship that will help clients "help themselves" (Schein, 2016). Navigating the client-consultant relationship and the consulting process, especially in the hybrid work context, requires increasingly sophisticated knowledge and skills on behalf of the consultant to ensure the effective delivery of expected services (Greiner et al., 2011;Collina, 2021). ...
Purpose
The field of organizational consulting is often criticized for the lack of data supporting the practice and limited understanding of individual characteristics required for consultants to make a positive impact on organizations. The aims of this study were (1) to identify existing evidence on consultants’ knowledge, skills, abilities and other personal attributes (KSAO) related to organizational consulting effectiveness and (2) to lay the foundation of an empirically derived competency framework for effective consulting.
Design/methodology/approach
A scoping review of scientific peer-reviewed papers published between 1973 and 2023 and exploring attributes of the consultant related to consulting effectiveness was carried out among three academic databases and one consulting-specific journal. Content analysis was conducted in NVivo using an inductive/deductive approach.
Findings
In total, 32 single individual characteristics were extracted from 13 empirical papers and organized into 3 broad categories: (1) knowledge, (2) skills and abilities, and (3) other personal attributes. Results showed that skills and abilities have received the most attention from scholars, emphasizing the importance for consulting training programs to focus on the development of process-related and relational skills. Knowledge and personal attributes, including personality traits, were marked by a paucity of research.
Originality/value
The findings laid the foundation of a first data-based competency model for consulting effectiveness, useful for both researchers and practitioners. The current review identified gaps in the literature and highlighted opportunities for consolidating research in the field of organizational consulting.
... Indeed, we live in an era of digitalization where Big Data, AI & ML algorithms change how people work (Leonardi & Treem, 2020), and even more so in large organizations (Steiber et al., 2020). Consequently, the transformation of the MC is still in progress, especially in the (post) Covid period with virtualization and remote working, which are increasingly accepted both by clients and MC firms (Collina, 2021;Manyika et al., 2021;Laffitte, 2022). ...
This article summarizes the developments in Management Consulting (MC) over the last century and explores several questions frequently appearing in MC research: Does MC add value? Does MC accelerate innovation? How digitization and advanced technologies will impact MC? What is the level of trust that business professionals put in MC? Although research questions are derived mainly from scholarly research, answers are sought from a managerial point of view based on a global survey with 122 participants. Results showed a positive tendency about MC among participants, where consultants are slightly more optimistic about their influence; also, the impact of advanced technologies, such as AI, on MC is confirmed, possibly explaining the high growth rate of technology-driven consulting over the last few years.
... Recurring to AI will be a huge pill to swallow for consulting industry (Libert & Beck, 2017) anyway. In addition to this, the increase of automation, both partial or total, will assist the evolution of the trust models and clientconsultants' relationships, for virtual and digital consultancy along the consultancy lifecycle (Collina, 2021), and the additional trust element for AI and automation adoption for innovative technology (Bedué & Fritzsche, 2022). ...
The management consulting business model requires new changes in this new era of disruptions. The typical management consulting business mode is based on consultants either training and developing or engaging in actual management consulting. Today, this has been combined due to operational risk management. The reason is that identifying problems and providing solutions to senior managers is not enough today - consultants need to also be able to offer and execute solutions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has placed consultants in what is known as a dual role. In this article, we examine the challenges of the management consulting business model and provide an alternative way for large consulting companies and those medium to small organizations to re-emerge with sustenance. These challenges were found in our interviews with 81 senior management consultants at McKinsey & Company and Boston Consulting Group, Inc. in the United States, Australia, Hong Kong, and the United Arab Emirates.
The article highlights the importance of business and management consulting field and its current trends, especially in the context of pandemic and worldwide changes. The author highlights the role of consulting in accelerating best practices in collaboration, flexibility, inclusion, and accountability to its clients in order to create a better future for all, and also includes a statistical analysis of the development of consulting on a global and European scale, outlining the most important indicators according to the nature of the services rendered, the locations of the clients, and the types of client’s industries. The author argues that the trends show that consulting is becoming an increasingly important component of the business environment, and that the emergence of new economic sectors and professions will condition the need to develop new capacities and apply new managerial knowledge and tools, which will stimulate the growth of both consulting and related fields. The article provides data on the development of the consulting in the Republic of Moldova, including the difficulties faced by the companies. Author believes there is "room for growth" in the national consulting despite the fact that it is a young market marked by the challenges facing society and influenced by the small size of the national economy. The author believes that the future of it will be profoundly influenced by remote work and digitization, service export, collaboration, and improved quality.
This is a view of the $150bn global management consultancy industry, abridged from a masterclass presentation given to the Institute of Management Consultants and Advisers in Ireland in November 2020. The paper looks forward and explores the implications of current sector dynamics. It is structured into two sections: the global management consulting market, and the implications for consulting business models.
Virtual teams (i.e., geographically distributed collaborations that rely on technology to communicate and cooperate) are central to maintaining our increasingly globalized social and economic infrastructure. “Global Virtual Teams” that include members from around the world are the most extreme example and are growing in prevalence (Scott and Wildman in Culture, communication, and conflict: a review of the global virtual team literature, Springer, New York, 2015). There has been a multitude of studies examining the difficulties faced by collaborations and use of technology in various narrow contexts. However, there has been little work in examining the challenges faced by virtual teams and their use of technology to mitigate issues. To address this issue, a literature review was performed to highlight the collaboration challenges experienced by virtual teams and existing mitigation strategies. In this review, a well-planned search strategy was utilized to identify a total of 255 relevant studies, primarily focusing on technology use. The physical factors relating to distance are tightly coupled with the cognitive, social, and emotional challenges faced by virtual teams. However, based on research topics in the selected studies, we separate challenges as belonging to five categories: geographical distance, temporal distance, perceived distance, the configuration of dispersed teams, and diversity of workers. In addition, findings from this literature review expose opportunities for research, such as resolving discrepancies regarding the effect of tightly coupled work on collaboration and the effect of temporal dispersion on coordination costs. Finally, we use these results to discuss opportunities and implications for designing groupware that better support collaborative tasks in virtual teams.
The role of consultants is ever changing. As digitalization continues to progress, the consultants of tomorrow may acquire several technological advantages, while at the same time they may also face new challenges. This theoretical/speculative study draws upon some of the available literature and the authors’ own best-practice experiences in exploring some of the most pressing issues of the digitalization process of consulting of today, with an anticipation of how the role and profile of the consultants may come to develop in the near future as digitalization and the digital transformation ensues. The development of analytics tools will be of paramount importance. To this end, four phases of consulting have been identified: (1) the pre-analysis phase, (2) the problem-identification phase, (3) the analysis phase and (4) the implementation phase. The chapter concludes that digitalization will carry the greatest benefit during phase 3, the analysis phase. A risk brought on by the advancement of digitalization is that organizations may be tempted to try optimizing their performance by having in-house data scientists take on more of the consultants’ traditional tasks, which may lead to less favorable outcomes. However, going forward, consultants and data scientists will likely need to cooperate and synergize their efforts.
Through a series of studies, the overarching aim of this book is to investigate if and how the digitalization/digital transformation process causes (or may cause) the autonomy of various labor functions, and its impact in creating (or stymieing) various job opportunities on the labor market. This book also seeks to illuminate what actors/groups are mostly benefited by the digitalization/digital transformation and which actors/groups that are put at risk by it.
This book takes its point of departure from a 2016 OECD report that contends that the impact digitalization has on the future of labor is ambiguous as on the one hand it is suggested that technological change is labor-saving, but on the other hand, it is suggested that digital technologies have not created new jobs on a scale that it replaces old jobs. Another 2018 OECD report indicated that digitalization and automation as such does not pose a real risk of destroying any significant number of jobs for the foreseeable future, although tasks would by and large change significantly. This would affects welfare, as most of its revenue stems from taxation, and particularly so from the taxation on labor (directly or indirectly). For this reason, this book will set out to explore how the future technological and societal advancements impact labor conditions.
The book seeks to provide an innovative, enriching and controversial take on how various aspects of the labor market can be (and are) affected the ongoing digitalization trend in a way that is not covered by extant literature. As such, this book intends to cater to a wider readership, from a general audience and students, to specialized processionals and academics wanting to gain a deeper understanding of the possible future developments of the labor market in light of an accelerating digitalization/digital transformation of society at large.
Do we really need personal meetings to develop trust within teams? Which factors impact trust emergence within face-to-face and virtual teams? How do high-trust teams interact compared with teams with low team trust? Trust is seen as an important predictor of behavior in teams. However, the psychological mechanisms linking team trust to both its antecedents and its behavioral consequences are not well understood. The present study introduces a new taxonomy of team trust mechanisms by integrating results from a qualitative interview study with prior theoretical and empirical research on team trust. We conducted exploratory interviews based on the critical incident technique with 55 professionals who had substantial teamwork experience. Altogether, 776 behavioral items were collected stemming from 127 team events that were perceived as critical
There is a broad consensus amongst law firms and in-house legal departments that next generation “Legal Tech” – particularly in the form of Blockchain-based technologies and Smart Contracts – will have a profound impact on the future operations of all legal service providers. Legal Tech startups are already revolutionizing the legal industry by increasing the speed and efficiency of traditional legal services or replacing them altogether with new technologies.
This on-going process of disruption within the legal profession offers significant opportunities for all business. However, it also poses a number of challenges for practitioners, trade associations, technology vendors, and regulators who often struggle to keep up with the technologies, resulting in a widening regulatory “gap.” Many uncertainties remain regarding the scope, direction, and effects of these new technologies and their integration with existing practices and legacy systems. Adding to the challenges is the growing need for easy-to-use contracting solutions, on the one hand, and for protecting the users of such solutions, on the other. To respond to the challenges and to provide better legal communications, systems, and services Legal Tech scholars and practitioners have found allies in the emerging field of Legal Design.
This collection brings together leading scholars and practitioners working on these issues from diverse jurisdictions. The aim is to introduce Blockchain and Smart Contract technologies, and to examine their on-going impact on the legal profession, business and regulators.
This research work investigates the development of interpersonal trust between the client and the consultant during the consulting process. It gives a conceptual outline of the trust building dimensions in the consultant-client relationship in terms of propensity to trust, perceived trustworthiness and the conditions of the trust situation with referring to the integrated trust model of Mayer, Davis and Schoorman. The research findings are enhanced by a qualitative practical investigation to provide a further context-specific concretization. Even though the implications from the practical investigation are in main parts congruent with the conceptual findings, it turned out that trust as a social mechanism is difficult to be grasped during practical interviews, why a conceptual foundation is indispensable to capture the total trust spectrum. This work shows that the trustworthy factors of abilities, integrity and benevolence are relevant for building interpersonal trust between the consultant and client, whereas a lack of ability-related trustworthiness cannot be compensated by the others. It is identified that signaling same-goal-orientation with the client and demonstrating a supportive role for the client’s interests are key factors for building trust by the consultant. It is also highlighted that a transparent working approach of the consultant is vital to reduce the client’s uncertainty and to promote trust building.
The objective of this paper is to understand the reasons for creating temporary spatial proximity in work processes of knowledge-intensive business services. Obligations to create temporary special proximity are linked to developing processes of interpersonal trust. Based on qualitative interviews, focusing and showing appreciation are identified as drivers to create temporary spatial proximity as ‘valuable moments’ throughout project work. Undivided attention in a special and, therefore, valuable moment is created through insulation (outward effect) and bonding (inward effect), which are to be understood as two sides of the same coin and as supporting the development of cognitive trust and affective trust.