The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of the Psychology of Training, Development, and Performance Improvement

20Structured Actions of Intentional Development

Nuno Rebelo dos Santos and Leonor Pais

Introduction

Several structured actions for professional and personal development are available for human resources and organizations. Those actions are frequently made available in organizations, which is important considering employee development is one of the most powerful motivators for high performers. It is through people development that organizations reach good performance. This chapter presents a revision of the conceptual definitions of some of those structured actions which are based, like training, on the interaction and relationships between two or more individuals who interrelate for at least one of them to develop in one or several dimensions of personal or professional fields. The criteria used to choose which actions to include in our comparative analysis are: (a) structured actions, meaning there is a prescribed way (with varying degrees of flexibility) to carry them out; (b) based on interpersonal interaction and relationships; (c) having conceptual developments and some associated research, so they have an identity; (d) used for promoting the development of people in organizations; and (e) having as the main guiding thread the practice of real people, being a way of reflection-on-action (Schön, 1996). Some of these characteristics are shared by several actions, such as training, but we exclude training from our chapter considering it is dealt with thoroughly in other chapters ...