Role 1. 'Unemployment' Metaphor

Meeting Participant Roles and Contract (Part #6)

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We are less rewarded for our involvement in a meeting when we assume that our role has been more central to its processes than when we are able to question its value to other participants.

In this mode each experiences the anguish of being underemployed in the meeting. This may be perceived as the failure of others to acknowledge the role that s/he performs in the gathering or their failure to create openings to make use of the skills that s/he brings to the event. As a consequence there is a frustration at not being able to contribute effectively, associated with a sense of not being appropriately rewarded for what s/he has to offer. But at the same time, and when given the opportunity, each will tend exploitatively to use what others have to offer, offering minimal acknowledgement and psychic rewards.

More fundamentally, through this mode the meeting and the participants are challenged as to how to make best use of the opportunities of the occasion and how to be appropriately rewarded. The frustrations of underemployment can easily expose participants to a sense of alienation and purposelessness.

• Challenge: Responding to the constraint of fairness (Role 7) in undertaking significant initiatives (Role 1).
• Complementarities: Reconciling opportunities for significant initiatives (Role 1) with the dilemmas of exploitation (Role 9) and of appropriate management (Role 5).
• Systemic formal equivalents: Developmental and expansion orientation also common to product development (Role 10), procedural development (Role 7), and population development (Role 4).