The Relationship between Concepts of Rational, Natural and Open Systems: Managing Organizations Today.

Author(s)

Őzgür Őnday ,

Download Full PDF Pages: 40-48 | Views: 351 | Downloads: 103 | DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3464730

Volume 5 - April 2016 (04)

Abstract

Ask the typical public or private sector manager to draw a picture of his or her mental model of an organization, more often you will encounter a final result of some version of the classic, pyramid-shaped organizational diagram. In other words, many managers see organization as structure. Here, what structure means can be defined as the way the work or activity is divided up and reporting relationships arranged. This tendency structure in fact is not surprising, given the bureaucratic mind set prevalent in many large organizations. Unfortunately, the reality of organization is far more complicated, and capably guiding organizations through change requires a much more sophisticated understanding of relationships. In other words, "organization is structure" dead for the leader to develop a multidimensional picture of the organization. Organizational/management science refers to the aid in the form of system theory applied to the organization, organizational sociology, and organizational modeling. System theory came from the natural sciences with the aim of understanding sets of objects, the relationships between those objects, and the relationship between sets of objects and their environments. The solar system and the human body are seen to be systems. System theory has been widely recognized and applied to the study of organizations. System approaches is related to an ideology arising at a particular point in the past 200 years, in which especially values and perceived needs were incorporated into organizational designs and management methods. Incorporating the rise of large and distributed organizations in the mid-19th century to our present concepts of ecological systems, the field of organizational sociology has seen various organizational types and taken into order as a typology including rational, natural, and open systems (Scott, 2003). This paper wants to propose a possible basis for synthesis, and suggest its implications today. 

Keywords

 Rational Systems, Natural Systems, Open Systems, Organizing, Organization.a 

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