preview

The Role of the Management Consultant Essay

Better Essays
Open Document

Introduction
The review set out to discuss the statement "It is the consultant’s responsibility to facilitate client decision-making, not change the decisions the client would have made anyway" (Wickham and Wickham 2008).
To do so, the review firstly outlines the client- consultant relationship and the consultant’s responsibility and role once they are hired, in light of the work of prominent authors like Appelbaum (2004), Calvert (2005) and O’Mahoney (2010).

Then, the review analyses the client’s decision-making processes and consultant’s role in it, with help of authors like Wickham and Wickham (2008), Schein (1997) and Turner (1982). It specifically outlines the differences in Expert and Facilitator role of a consultant to …show more content…

Consultant’s Role and Responsibility

Firstly it is important to understand why the client hires consultants and what is expected of them. In his book O’Mahoney (2010 p.95) cites the work of Czerniawska (2002) to say that client mostly hire consultant when they do not have the expertise to perform the task. This is referred as “Expert role” by O’Mahoney. However O’Mahoney (2010 p.95) also cites the argument made by Mckenna (2006) that consultants were hired by clients to improve performance. To add to the argument, he discusses the work of Schein (1997) that most of the time, projects follows the process consulting mode where client and consultant work together to arrive at a solution. Thus, it can be inferred that to work in any of the above discussed mode, a consultant has to follow particular roles like Expert, Facilitator or Political agent because each of these role will have different impact on the client’s decision–making process.

Thus we need to understand the roles management consultant play, and what is management consultancy? Wickham and Wickham (2008) suggest that management consulting is a “management activity” and a special form of management. The management consultancy is defined as:
“The creation of value for organisations, through the application of knowledge, techniques and assets, to improve business performance. This is achieved through the rendering

Get Access
Related
Get Access