What is the story behind the development of credentialing in the mental health professions, and how has it evolved to meet the changing needs of society and the counseling profession? What challenges and opportunities have emerged due to this evolution, and what can we learn from this history as we strive to advance the counseling field in the coming years?
The history of counseling field, though relatively new, is rich. The counseling field developed from the guidance movement in response to recognition of a need for mental health and guidance counseling for individuals facing developmental milestones. The counseling profession developed in many ways from responses to changes in society. In the early 20th century, when counseling was first emerging, humanistic reform, with an increased emphasis on the value of all human beings, was also emerging. Human qualities such as choice, creativity, self-realization, and ultimately the value of all people became the focus of human change and intervention. During this period of humanistic reform, society saw changes in conditions of prisons, asylums, and factories based on the humanistic principles noted above.
dimensions (Rees & Hall, 2010). Kurt Lewin (1951) points out that increasing one set of forces without decreasing the other set of forces will increase tension and conflict in the organization. Reducing the other set of forces may reduce the amount of tension. Although increasing driving forces is sometimes effective, it is usually better to reduce the resisting forces because increasing driving forces often tends to be offset by increased resistance.
In order to maintain contact with the external environment, companies have to create external development groups. The latter have the task to establish meetings with individuals, groups, research labs, collaborators, even market competitors. Anyone can suggest new technologies, prototypes or connections with the consumer base (Doina & Sebastian, 2012).To manage change and the consequent uncertainty effectively, practitioners and managers need to understand the external world, how this impacts on organizations and how this then impacts on their teams and on them as individuals (Johnson & Williams, 2007).
According to Meaney and Pung (2008), the driving force for the change is of internal in nature but they don`t know which tools were used to give the greenlight for initializing the changes. Their general purpose is consequently to enhance profitability, so that the target variables are small sco tool
concordant with the primary reasons for companies to change. Likewise, Gimmon and Benjamin (2014) argued that internal factors were considered more likely than external factors to drive radical strategic changes, but only with marginal significance. They also opined further research is required to validate these findings.
Pressures for change may be external or internal to the organization. When organization performance is unsatisfactory, for example, pressures may come from stakeholders (groups with a stake in the success of the organization) at once. These pressures are often conflicting. For instance, stock holders may demand improved earnings and dividends at the same time that environmental protection groups want the firm to focus more on costly antipollution activities (Alkaya & Hepaktan, 2003). Only there is a one-way path for change momentum between ‘forward’ and ‘backward’ in modern business environment. An Organization change is occurring as a result of an ever-changing environment or as a response to a modern scenario (Pryor, et al., 2008).
In a 2007 research involving 28 organizations, J.S. Oakland and S.J. Tanner found that “successful change focuses on both strategic and operational issues”. The research identified external drivers to be customer requirement, demand from other stakeholders, governments’ regulatory demands, market competition, and shareholders.
The systems perspective of change is an approach that views organizations as a