DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE ON ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION

• Sytems Perspective• Cultural Studies• Critical Approach• Postmodern Perspective

The Systems Perspective on Organizations and Communication

Speaker: Sol Erwin G. Diaz

Historical and Cultural Background

• Although it has come to be applied to social systems,the systems approach has it roots in the sciences, notably physics, information theory, and biology.

The Origin of Systems Theory in the Sciences.

Principles drawn from Newtonian physics:• Scientific management relied heavily on time and

motion studies to provide data to managers about worker productivity.

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity:• Conceptualizing time and motion studies within

the limited framework of a specific task, the interpretation of task is expanded to include how it functions as part of a dynamic interdependent system.

Example:• A company can work hardto lower the cost of

its product through more efficient production, but if it fails to closely monitor consumer tastes, it may end up failing in any case.

Systems theory encourages us to explore how organizational effectiveness depends on the coordination of the total enterprise.

Biology and General Systems Theory

• Specific Contributor to Systems theory – the life sciences, especially Biology.

• A system is alive not because of any particular component or component process, but because of the relationships and interchanges among processes.

• Holistic approach –to consider the properties of systems that come out of the relationships among their parts.

What is a SYSTEM?

- Defined as a complex set of relationships among interdependent parts or components.

- In the study of organizational communication, we are concerned with the nature of those components in organizations and with the relationships among them.

Environment and Open Systems

• Systems theory tells us that organizations do not exist as entities isolated from the rest of the world. Rather, organizations exist in increasingly turbulent environments, which provide inputs to the organization and receive outputs in the form of products and services.

Interdependence

• Essential quality of a system• Refers to the wholeness of the system and its

environment and to the interrelationships of individuals within the system.

Goals

• From a scientific management perspective, goals are central: Both individuals and organizations direct their activities toward goal attainment.

• From an institutional perspective, organizations and their members espouse goals, but rarely do their goals guide their behavior.

• From the open-systems perspective, goals are negotiated among interdependent factions in the organization and are heavily influenced by its environment.

Processes and Feedback

• A system is not simply and interdependent set of components; it is also an interdependent collection of processes that interact over time.

• Example:

Selling of Radio

Transmitter

Submit orders to Engineering or manufacturing

have to do in a timely fashion to avoid ineffeciency and other work-flow related problem.

Engineering in turn, would need to deliver accurate drawings to manufacturing on schedule.

Manufacturing would be required to meet the customer's quality standard and delivery date.

Customer Dissatisfied

Feedback

• Feedback – is define as a system of loops

Two types of Feedback in Systems Theory:1.Negative Feedback – Deviation-counteracting2.Positive Feedback – Deviation-amplifying

Margaret Wheatley’s New Science of Leadership

• New Science – a combination of quantum physics, self-organizing systems theory, and chaos theory.

• The underlying currents are a movement toward holism, toward understanding the system as a system and giving primacy to the relationships that exist among seemingly discrete parts.

Wheatley argues the following:1. There are no things in themselves; even particles of matter are

intermediate states in a network of interactions2. Information, not matter, is the creative energy of the universe3. All living things are naturally engaged in self renewal, and

organizations do this by making creative use of their environments

4. The search for machine-like control by management is counterproductive

5. What we call “disorder” is part of the natural process of order making

6. The desire to make meaning is the “strange attractor” that keeps human being s in a constant tendency toward self-organization.

Peter Senge’s Learning Organization

• He is concerned with holism and inclined to use scientific terminology

• Senge focuses on the distinction between what he calls “learning organizations” and organizations that have a learning disability or a lack of understanding about how they function as systems.

Learning Organizations exhibit five features:

1. System thinking2. Personal Mastery3. Flexible Mental Models4. A shared Vision5. Team Learning

Karl Weick’s Sense-Making Model• His work has reinvigorated systems theory by

connecting it with issues of sense making, meaning, and communication, while also providing a bridge or the development of cultural studies of organizations.

Weick’s model has three parts:1.Inactment2.Selection3.Retention

• Enactment – organizational members create environments through their actions and patterns of attention, and these environments can vary in terms of their perceived degree of equivocality or uncertainty.

• Selection – collective sense making is accomplished through communication.

• Retention – successful interpretation are saved for future use.

Retrospective Sense Making

• An underlying assumption of Weick’s model is that decision making is largely retrospective

• Although people in organization think they plan first and then act according to plan, Weick argues that people really act first and later examine their actions in an attempt to explain their meaning.

Seven properties of sense making:

1. Identity Construction2. Retrospection3. Enactment4. Socialization5. Continuation6. Extracted Cues7. Plausibility

Loose Coupling

• Weick stresses the importance of communication at work, he points out that unlike the connections among biological systems, the communication connections among people in organizations vary in intensity and are often loose or weak.

Partial Inclusion

• In analysing the balance between work and other activities, Weick uses his theory of partial inclusion to explain why certain strategies for motivating employees are ineffective.

• He holds that employees are only partially included in the workplace; that is at work we see some but not all of their behaviors.

Explicit comparison of scientific management and systems theories

SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS THEORIES

Metaphor: Machines

Theme: Efficiency – a machine is the sum of its parts.

Influences: Industrial Revolution, modernity,capitalism, and empire; assembly –line production and management; division of labor, interchangeable parts, coordination of many small, skilled jobs.

Focus of management principles: “The only things that count are the finished product and the bottom line”; time and motion studies.

Metaphor: Biological Organisms

Theme: Complexity – a system is greater that the sum of its parts.

Influences: Einstein’s theory of relativity; McLuhan’s global information society; Miller’s biological system; von Bertalanffy’s general system; information engineering model of communication.

Focus of management principles: “ Everything counts”; studies of interdependent processes, information flows and feedback, environments and contingencies.

SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS THEORIES

Management of Individuals as interchangeable parts

Planning the work, working the plan

Motivation by fear and money

Theory of Communication:

Sender -Message -Channel - Receiver

Management of relationships among components; focus on groups and networks

Planning the work, using feedback to correct the plan

Motivation by needs and contingencies

Theory of Communication:

Feedback

Sender- Message – Channel – Receiver

Noise

SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS THEORIES

Theory of Leadership: Trait (Tall, white males with blond hair and blue eyes, who come from strong moral backgrounds)

Limitations: 1.Forgets that humans are more complex than machines; 2.Encourages individual boredom and deep divisions between managers and employees3.Discourages communication, individual needs, job initiative, task innovation, personal responsibility, and empowerment

Theory of Leadership: Adaptive (rhetorical contingency) – anyone can learn the skills of leading by attending to the requirements of behavioral flexibility.

Limitations: 1.Forgets that humans are symbolic as as biological;2.Encourages mathematical complexities that are difficult to put into everyday practices3.Equates communication with information.