Supportive Supervision

Introduction

Supportive supervision is a necessary tool for determining the service quality and it helps in developing performance. Supervisors are needed to help support behavioral change through strengthen the human resources management systems and it can also promote HRM policies that can enable the business environment that can rise effectiveness of employees' performance, raise their retention and improve employees' morale. (Ampofo et al, 2019) The current paper is reviewing a peer reviewed article that discusses the Impact of supportive supervision on the implementation of HRM processes as a mixed-methods study in Tanzania. The paper is presenting a STEM project for increasing the managers' capacity in supporting and supervising the staff in Tanzania. The current paper is a critical review for the article referring to the different HRM relevant techniques applied and presented in the paper. 

Literature Review

Supervision is related to quality service delivery and this is related to the role of management. Supervisors need many things in order to be able to support the workforce such as training and working according to different approaches of supervision. Liu and Batt, (2010) discussed the impact of supervisors on the performance referring to the different strategies and approaches supervisors can combine to improve performance such as individualized coaching and managing the working relationships by means of communication and improving the work environment in addition to the effective implementation of the workplace technology that can enable different practices and interventions. Cintrón and Flaniken, (2020) discussed how performance appraisal can be supported through supervision through supportive supervision as they discussed performance appraisal methods and systems for data collecting and good record keeping, they explained how supervision can support performance appraisal when certain measures and frameworks are used such as subjective methods that can cope with the changing nature of the workplace and objective methods that can measure job performance and referred to the challenges that may exist in the work environment and can delay the job of supervision such as the workload, conflicts in the work environment and shortage of employees that may delay the work of supervisions. Plosser et al, (2020) discussed supervision impact on many factors in the work environment such as profitability, growth and riskiness and they related supervision to regulation and how they can play effective roles within the organization to mentor human resources and reduce risks that may appear within the activities of the organization, they explained how they can develop a new identification strategy that can go beyond correlation to realize the impact of supervision on the service quality and the human resources performance.

Critical Review

The article discusses supervision as a main task in health systems management and explains how it can change the quality service delivery. The article is also representing different forms of supervision that relates to how to manage problems that may appear in service delivery such as supportive supervision that encourages communication between supervisors and supervised human resources. The article refers to literature in reasoning for its hypothesis as it refers to literature that discusses how management can be effective in healthcare organizations and literature that discusses measurement of supervision in the work environment. The article is mainly a study in Tanzania as it investigates the situation there and how healthcare organizations in Tanzania manage supervision and support it with training and different frameworks. Methodology of the paper depends on addressing the gap between the HRM policy and practice The study used a special design that is mixed-method collecting data from health facilities for assessing the change in practice and it also employs discussions that are based on groups in order to find out the supervisors' perceptions for a period of twelve months following STEM implementation in three regions in Tanzania. The focus of the study is on supervisors' perceptions on supportive HRM processes implementation and its impact on the supervision practice. 

The study was applied based on a mixed-methods approach that was applied within a bigger STEM project that include different supervisors who presented many interventions that can help improve the role of supervision within the organization such as human resources management processes and policies that supervisors can learn through training such as effective team management, communication and strategies for managing the challenges within the work environment and solve problems supervisors may face when they are trying to raise the quality of the service delivery. The study objective is assessing the strategy of supportive supervision on HRM implementation that is followed by a group of trial intervention such as supporting, training and empowering policies for managers who can work according to two means of supervision. The study could assess the managers' role in retaining staff and motivating them through certain interventions that can improve the working environment. This was also discussed in literature that proved the effectiveness of such intervention as Uduma et al, (2017) referred to supporting the capacity of supervisors to support their staff and guide them at health facility level, they suggest that the interventions related to these practices proved to be effective as supportive supervision is rather different from coaching and that workers who are motivated by supervisors are better retained than others who received coaching without intensive training for supervisors to support workers and enable communication with them. The author of the article focused on reasoning and evidence that support the hypotheses of the research as the author discussed different measures that may be either qualitative or quantitative to discuss some processes that can improve the supervision process such as the staff job description, guidelines for supervision, absenteeism registers, personnel files and other different practices that can improve the process of supervision. Yang and Lew, (2020) discussed the importance of implementing sustainable human resources practices that are related to leadership style as a means for supervision within the organization that is connected to better work performance and retained workers. This issue of having sustainable effective leadership as a part of sustainable supervision is lacked in the current article of Henry et al, (2016) as the authors focused on the different practices supervisors can develop such as recording keeping systems without referring to the way of making this sustainable and focused on the importance of training without referring to sustainable training practices and how to maintain such sustainability.  The article investigated how STEM intervention can improve the work environment through training managers and helping them change the approaches of HRM they use and referred to management support as one of the most important components of the work environment and focused on certain elements to investigate by the participants in the interview such as personnel files, workers' retention, job description and other elements, the research was applied on certain intervention groups and there was the control group and changes were measured, results showed that there was a positive impact for the supervision facilities within the STEM project as training in particular provided better results on workers' satisfaction levels and retention. The STEM intervention that is multifaceted that focused on including training within supervision, the study facility records showed that active HR policies improved performances in the districts where the interventions took place in the three regions in Tanzania and results also showed that inadequate supervision that is associated with poor regulation and practices of poor monitoring can reduce the quality of the care service provided and there should be innovative and new processes for the supervision interventions. This can also be supported in authors' researches such as in (Straub et al, 2018) as they confirmed that there can be great impact for supervisors' support for practices that can provide better perceptions for the work environment and lead employees to realize the organizational environment as being supportive to the better performance.       

Limitation of the study

The article may have some other limitations such as assessing some elements needs much information that is lacked in the article such as absenteeism records were not existed in the paper in a systematic way that can declare how health facilities can deal with them. There are other limitations such as presenting effective means that can be used to face the challenges supervisors face during assessing performance, motivating employees and working in a work environment that may include certain resistances such as change resistances that some employees may have against innovative supervision strategies and policies.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is necessary to refer to the importance of supervision as a main HRM factor when it is implemented in a way that can encourage better performance and that new approaches for training supervisors can encourage communications with the supervised workers as this is effective in providing better outcomes and higher working performance. The article provided information about how supervision is different from coaching and that supervision practices and tools can be new and different when supervisors receive enough training and support. The article needs more information that can help supervisors face challenges that they may face within the work place and information about keeping sustainable effective supervision to release better results.