Productivity Paradox In Management

The link between more investments in information technology (IT) and productivity has always been tenuous to demonstrate. Nobel Prize Laureate Robert Solow coined the term “productivity paradox” to explain the difficulty in observing the actual gains in productivity as a result of investments in information technology. Throughout business, economics, healthcare among other fields, observations of “productivity paradox” have been well documented and researched. In the areas of healthcare, researchers have sought to establish the links between investments in IT on quality or care; costs and efficiency; and IT professionals’ tasks and roles and found inconclusive evidences on the impact of IT on healthcare (Lapointe, Liette et al, 2011). Similarly,

The productivity growth from 2009 to 2013 was 2.9 per cent on an annualised basis while productivity has actually been largely stagnant growing at only 0.2 per cent from 2010 to 2013 . It is a practical issue, in fact some would even argue that it is a survival issue, as Singapore an island without natural resources and a strong economic hinterland, productivity remains the only sustainable way for growth . While researchers from the economic and information technology disciplines have looked at the productivity paradox from their respective lenses, I seek to examine the paradox from a workplace learning perspective; coaching or more specifically career

The first study by Theeboom et al (2013) is a meta-analysis on the effects of coaching on individual level outcomes in an organizational context. In this study, the authors aimed to shed light on the effectiveness of coaching within an organizational context. They addressed the question of coaching effectiveness in 5 areas: performance/skills, well-being, coping, work attitudes, and goal-directed self-regulation. The second study I consulted for the review process is Grant et al (2010), ‘The State of Play in Coaching Today: A Comprehensive Review of the Field’. The reasons why I relied on these two studies is because the authors undertook a comprehensive review of the coaching effectiveness and coaching literature achieving both breadth and depth in the review. They were also able to point out gaps in the existing coaching literature, overlaps between coaching and other disciplines and suggest future directions for research on