High Expectations at Consultancies

By Professor Onno Bouwmeester

Consultants are one of the professions studied in the Centre for Research on Organisations, Work and Society. One project by Onno Bouwmeester, Prof. of Consulting and Business Ethics, studies how consultants experience their work, which is known as very demanding. In several interview studies, consultants have shared their experiences with work stress (Muhlhaus and Bouwmeester, 2016), with pressuring leadership (Bouwmeester and Kok, 2018), with work-life balance (Bouwmeester et al 2021) and related to the high expectations the psychological taint they experience, as society not only applauds the high status work of consultants, but is also critical towards the signs of exhaustion and burnout in the sector (Bouwmeester et al. 2022). A more recent study has explored why so many consultants end up being self-employed. One important reason is the ‘up-or-out’ system, meaning that if you cannot meet the requirements for the next career step, you are asked to leave the company. However, the other side of the coin is that consultants often choose not to meet the new demands, as they feel they can have better work-life balance and better income when they start their own consultancy. In the Netherlands our research team found that about half of all consultants are self-employed, and on average they made this decision after 8 years of employment, once the learning curve at their consultancies was no longer so steep (Bouwmeester and Slaats 2024). As part of the project, we are currently investigating careers of ‘minority consultants’, who are increasingly taking jobs at consultancies. Another topic under investigation by the team is the issue of ‘emotional labour’ at consultancy organisations.

Bouwmeester, O., Atkinson, R., Noury, L., & Ruotsalainen, R. (2021). Work-life balance policies in high performance organisations: A comparative interview study with millennials in Dutch consultancies. German Journal of Human Resource Management, 35(1), 6-32.

Bouwmeester, O., & Kok, T. E. (2018). Moral or dirty leadership: A qualitative study on how juniors are managed in Dutch consultancies. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 15(11), 2506.

Bouwmeester, O., & Slaats, M. (2024). First up then out: Self-employment as a response to normative control practices in elite consultancies. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 40(1), 101313.

Bouwmeester, O., Versteeg, B., van Bommel, K., & Sturdy, A. (2022). Accentuating dirty work: Coping with psychological taint in elite management consulting. German Journal of Human Resource Management, 36(4), 411-439.

Mühlhaus, J., & Bouwmeester, O. (2016). The paradoxical effect of self-categorization on work stress in a high-status occupation: Insights from management consulting. Human Relations, 69(9), 1823-1852.