The Role of the Supervisor in a Placement Agency

Abstract

Traditionally, the supervisor's responsibilities in a casework agency have consisted of three interacting components: administration, teaching, and helping. Currently, these aspects of the supervisor's role are being scrutinized. There is a ferment of thinking about supervision in the field of social casework which is having a refreshing, salutary effect. Supervision need no longer be accepted in uncritical fashion. It can now be appraised with candor, its conflictual elements identified, and its practices more clearly defined, diluted, changed, or eliminated in accordance with present needs and requirements. But a pendulum swing tends at times to carry a momentum that sweeps it beyond its intended destination. Strong opinions are being advanced that regular supervision for the experienced practitioner is neither useful nor desirable and that abolition of supervision would provide the caseworker with the distinction of having arrived at an advanced state of professional maturity. Some questions that still require close study have not been explored sufficiently, however, to warrant the elimination of individual supervision for experienced caseworkers. One such question is: Do the organizational requirements of different agency settings influence the ways in which supervision can most effectively be used? It may be hypothesized^ that settings will differ in the degrees and forms of supervision required for the attainment of organizational objectives. Another question is: Does the phenomenon of countertransference make