RESPECT WRITER - Global Expansion Project part 3

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Performance Improvement, vol. 49, no. 5, May/June 2010 ©2010 International Society for Performance Improvement

Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) • DOI: 10.1002/pfi.20150

RATIONAL, NATURAL, AND OPEN: ORGANIZATIONAL SYSTEM TYPOLOGIES AND THEIR RELEVANCE FOR PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT PROFESSIONALS

Donald J. Winiecki, EdD, PhD

The work of human performance technology (HPT) is always conducted in an organization of

some type. However, many of the frameworks and models of this field do not differentiate

between types of organizations. The discipline of organizational sociology has produced a

typology of organizations that can be of substantive use to the HPT practitioner. This article

provides a brief description of these types and links to HPT, with the goal of providing new

“tools to think with” for the HPT practitioner.

ONE CANNOT GO VERY far in a study of organizations without coming across references to “system” and urgent appeals to “be systemic.”

Although the most recognizable frameworks of human performance technology (HPT) also make clear refer- ences to system, the notion of system is treated differently depending on which framework one inspects. Some pri- oritize abstract rules, economics, and matters of efficiency (Gilbert, 1996). Others favor the interactive collaboration of human actors across different status groups in an orga- nization (Langdon, 2000). Others assert a particular angle on societal interests (Kaufman, 2005), while still others allude to physical systems concepts converted to a cyber- netic approach to human organizations (Brethower, 1999).

Each of these approaches to system is related to an ide- ology arising at a particular point in the past 200 years, in which particular values and perceived needs were incor- porated 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 identified different organizational types and arranged them into a typology including rational, natural, and open systems (Scott, 2003).

Although HPT seems to be silent regarding what orga- nizational system underpins any particular HPT frame- work, we can induce this information from a review of organizational system types. Such a review may help HPT practitioners better decide how to proceed when working with different organizations and different apparent needs.

RATIONAL SYSTEMS From the early 19th century, organizations were influ- enced by the idea that they and even entire societies were like physical machines that could be designed to fulfill predefined and large-scale purposes. With this view, each organizational component was considered a part of a metaphorical machine that could be designed and engi- neered to meet some goal. This concept is known as the rational system type. The work of Frederick Taylor typi- fies the rational system. Similarities between Taylor’s con- cepts and Gilbert’s behavioral engineering model make it apparent that concepts of rational systems are part of the very foundation of HPT (Chyung, 2005).

The rational system type gets its name from the idea that an organization’s purpose, goals, and processes can be totally defined upfront and the whole regulated, so that it functions according to these rational definitions and

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rules.1 Taylor’s industrial engineering principles and Gilbert’s use of behavioral psychology to organize data or knowledge, capacities or tools, and motives or incentives were each believed to allow one to engineer economically worthy performance (Gilbert, 1996; Taylor, 1947).

Over time, the expectations of the rational system type have been adapted to account for and accommodate the observable fact that people do not always behave according to rationalized expectations predicted by this engineering focus. Herb Simon––a microeconomist turned cognitive scientist––developed a concept called “satisficing” to account for this observation (Simon, 1994). When satisficing, people opt for a short-term goal or reward that provides the actor satisfying and sufficient (thus satisfice) feedback, rather than a greater, but delayed, goal that designers of the system considered to be rational. Satisficing behavior, thus, has the potential to fracture the integrity and even existence of predefined rational systems and organizations. For proponents of rational systems, this means that rather than relying on one abstractly defined “best way” of conduct and uni- versal schedules of reward, they must continually inspect workers and respecify incentive schedules, so that what they value as short-term (satisficing) rewards are avail- able to regulate them, which, in turn, would maintain the overall rationally defined system.

The abstract rules, which typify the rational system, are usually oriented to a regime of measurement and evalua- tion aimed at efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control (Ritzer, 2000). All of this fits the commonsense (if contested2) view that organizations are in business to make money and, thus, their entire organizational struc- ture should be designed to maximize profit.

Although this works in cases where internal and exter- nal variation can be controlled or even eliminated in favor of the specified rationalities, in large organizations or those without resources to continually adapt reinforce- ment apparatuses, the rational system is difficult to main- tain. This is the case because rational systems are primarily interested in maintaining rational rules and efficiencies, thus less able to account for and accommo- date external variation, which can affect factors such as sales and things that affect individual workers, their inter- ests, and satisficing tendencies.

NATURAL SYSTEMS Sometimes seen as a reaction to rational systems, natural systems are typified by an interest in maintaining the well-being of its members and the organization itself (Scott, 2003). The human resources movement, which accompanied the natural system type, arose from the

work of Australian Elton Mayo3 and his involvement late in a series of research projects at the Hawthorne factory early in the 20th century. In these projects, what turned out to be poorly designed research for testing scientific management (SM) principles (Bramel & Friend, 1981; Schwartzman, 1993; Scott), Mayo identified that workers exhibited practices which—rather than competitively and individually increasing productivity in return for short-term rewards (as predicted by SM)—were aimed at maintaining overall well-being of the workgroup. Only when workers considered the interests of the entire group to be protected, did Mayo identify sustainable changes in work productivity (Bramel & Friend; Schwartzman; Scott).

The natural system type gets its name from the funda- mental belief that organizations and their collective members accrue to something similar to a living organ- ism with unique goals, interests, and desires. This functionalist perspective flows from theories of Emile Durkheim, who considered society and its components analogous to a living organism, with subsystems func- tioning as metaphorical organs in its body (Durkheim, 1974). Consistent with this analogy, organizations are seen to pursue internal interests and attempt control or regulation of surroundings to survive as a unit.

Research on natural systems has consistently found that when workers perceive collective (at some level) ver- sus individual benefits, they are more willing to partici- pate in and, thus, sustain organizational initiatives. Consequently, research and interventions in natural sys- tems are typically aimed at affecting the sociocultural structures and belief systems of members rather than individual incentive-based programs as found in rational systems. If workers discover that an initiative promoted to enhance collective benefits is actually more “rational” in

Similarities between Taylor’s concepts and Gilbert’s behavioral engineering model make it apparent that concepts of rational systems are part of the very foundation of HPT.

Performance Improvement • Volume 49 • Number 5 • DOI: 10.1002/pfi 37

its aims, then they will exhibit behavior approximating Simon’s satisficing and subsequently produce difficulties of sustainability. This supports the notion that any partic- ular type of system is not abstractly true or right, but rather that social and structural conditions existing at many different levels play a substantive role in making such organization types visible.

Most contemporary natural systems innovations can be traced to research done at the Tavistock Institute in England after World War II, when the government called upon academics to help find a way to rebuild the country devastated from war. The foundational elements of natu- ral management strategies, such as T-groups, total quality management (TQM), and the like, were created at the Tavistock Institute (Rose, 1999). Largely, natural systems innovations were aimed at making workers value and feel responsible as quasimanagement personnel in the interest of ensuring the well-being of the whole organization, even as conditions internal and external to the orga- nization changed. Mixing rational system elements with natural systems has been shown to lead workers to frac- ture their own collective interests in return for individual gain. This has been labeled “team Taylorism” (Bain & Taylor, 2000; Baldry, Bain, & Taylor, 1998; Kinnie, Hutchinson, & Purcell, 2000; Knights & Odih, 2000) and has predictable difficulties in sustainability.

Under the natural system paradigm, although duties differ, management and labor alike are expected to adapt and help colleagues and work units adapt to internal and external changes in accomplishing goals. Consequently, natural system types are also characterized by goal com- plexity and a fluctuating set of interim processes and tar- gets as conditions of operation shift and change.

To accomplish this, a cooperative model of workplace systems has been proposed to promote the creation and maintenance of a common vision and goals within an organization and its subsystems (Barnard, 1938). Bar- nard’s cooperative model made structured communica- tion between different status groups central to the realization of continuous operation. Some models famil- iar to HPT practitioners, such as the “language of work,” reflect this orientation and bring it up to the present day (Langdon, 2000).

In cooperation models, interaction between status groups in an organization is to be accomplished following participatory techniques like those developed at the Tavistock Institute and later by influential experts includ- ing Likert, Maslow, McGregor, Drucker, and others. Different from the rational perspective where manage- ment commanded compliance simply by its rationally specified status above workers, in natural system perspec- tives, workers ratify management authority through

ongoing participation and cooperation. The desired out- come of engaging all personnel at some level in the orga- nization’s functioning is the creation of a sort of moral code such that even when, for whatever reason, existing rule systems break down, personnel will draw upon this shared code to alter their practices and maintain the orga- nization’s purpose and their part in it.

However, as is the case with rational systems, natural systems can become “inward looking” in protecting the interests of what members consider their own collec- tive interests. An example of this is bureaucratic behavior, as identified and defined by the sociologist Max Weber in the early 20th century. Because natural systems do not have predefined rules but rather general goals and mis- sions, it is up to members to create internal rules based on a definition of their mission. Weber observed that a bureaucracy can easily become insular and self-protective in its practices and all the while insist its allegiance to the well-being of the social systems in which it exists, even if the opposite can be said to occur. This was the case in Selznick’s study of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA; Selznick, 1966), in which he found that an intent to estab- lish administrative leadership knowledgeable of and responsible to a particularly hard hit region in the United States during the Great Depression led to a bureaucracy that took care of itself at the expense of the region and intended customers.

This is not to say that natural organization types are in and of themselves wasteful or adverse to the interests of customers and surrounding social systems. Natural systems can be very appropriate when members have the well- being of the collective and their surrounding society in their interest, and act in accord. As with rational systems, natural systems can be very responsive to and responsible for multiple constituencies, but as with rational systems, when they become ossified into structures that are cum- bersome and even impossible to change in the face of envi- ronmental shifts, natural systems lose their currency.

OPEN SYSTEMS Open system ideas arose from the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s observation that in ecological systems, everything can be seen as somehow interconnected and mutually influential. Changes occurring at only one point in an ecology may have short-term benefits for some, but in the long term, many subsystems may be adversely affected and ripple effects can influence other subsystems in unpredicted and undesirable ways (Bertalanffy, 1972).

From the perspective of physical science, Boulding has identified nine types of open systems (Boulding, 1956, in Scott, 2003, p. 84):

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1. Frameworks: Systems made up of static structures, such as the arrangements of atoms in a crystal or the anatomy of an animal.

2. Clockworks: Simple dynamic systems with predeter- mined motions, such as the clock and the solar system.

3. Cybernetic systems: Systems capable of self-regulation in terms of some externally prescribed target or crite- rion, such as a thermostat.

4. Open systems: Systems capable of self-maintenance based on a throughput of resources from their envi- ronment, such as a living cell.

5. Blueprinted-growth systems: Systems that reproduce not by duplication but by the production of seeds or eggs containing preprogrammed instructions for development, such as the acorn-oak system or the egg- chicken system.

6. Internal-image systems: Systems capable of a detailed awareness of the environment in which information is received and organized into an image or knowledge structure of the environment as a whole, a level at which animals function.

7. Symbol-processing systems: Systems that possess self- consciousness and so are capable of using language. Humans are said to function at this level.

8. Social systems: Multicephalous systems made up of actors functioning at level seven who share a common social order and culture. Social organizations operate at this level.

9. Transcendental systems: Systems composed of the “absolutes and the inescapable unknowables.”

Boulding indicates that human-made systems and sci- entific theories of systems have yet to reach much beyond the cybernetic system level, all the while their subject of interest is the eighth level. The difficulty in reaching beyond a cybernetic system level comes from our present inability to identify, account for, and adapt to all environ- mental and internal factors that affect a system’s func- tioning. Attempts to do so with our current knowledge and understanding have led to a reliance on the natural system ideas of constant communication and distributed responsibility or rational system ideas of ongoing task specification and regulation throughout an organization. This demonstrates how “genetic traces” of rational and natural system types continue to affect even more con- temporary systems thinking, which, in turn, may actually impede the realization of the latter in practice.4

Regardless, efforts to conceptualize organizations as cybernetic systems capable of responding to changes with rule-based logic have been important in increasing ability

of organizational leaders to develop or adapt processes for multiple contingencies imagined possible for a some- times unpredictable world. Use of the cybernetic systems concept has led to what Chris Argyris called “double-loop learning,” a process whereby some organizational action gets feedback from the environment, and the orga- nization adjusts itself according to rules to accommodate and respond to it with (presumably) positive outcomes for the organization (Argyris, 1982; compare with Brethower, 1999, pp. 70–72).

In practice, emphasis on cybernetic systems is typically manifested in specification of rule systems and processes, whereby feedback is converted to action. This often leads to reliance on rational-system concepts and tactics in attempts to effect compliance from personnel. The usual product is creation of an impression that organizations and their subsystems are “tightly coupled” in a manner consistent with the ideology of rational system types, irre- spective of the natural-level and higher-level open sys- tems concept that not all factors can be predicted and controlled.

Responding to this lack of controllability has led to conceptions of organizations as “loosely coupled.” Proponents of loosely coupled systems orient to the nat- ural system idea that individual actors may not follow rules precisely but may find other ways of meeting responsibilities, depending on many and varied factors. From this, loosely coupled open system concepts put more emphasis on the informal networks in an orga- nization’s social system to influence changes, rather than a reliance on rigid command-and-control ideas inherent to the tightly coupled (rationalized) cybernetic system concept. So, although both tightly coupled and loosely coupled systems may be considered cybernetic and, thus, open systems, tightly coupled systems designs are more reliant on rational-type concepts and loosely coupled sys- tems are more reliant on natural-type concepts in day-to- day operations (Scott, 2003). Thus, consistent with the earlier observation that foundational theories are some- how embedded into the metaphorical DNA of organiza- tions, we see that even attempts to produce open systems are affected by concepts of systems that were envisioned and practiced earlier.

Beyond the cybernetic level, open systems concepts allow for the idea that systems will adapt throughout to ongoing changes in their environment, rather than (sim- ply?) reacting to changes in terms of their current rule sets or values, effectively becoming a part of the ecology itself rather than attempting control of a constantly changing world.

Successfully becoming a part of an ecology of systems rests on the idea that higher levels of open systems are

Performance Improvement • Volume 49 • Number 5 • DOI: 10.1002/pfi 39

able to take unpredictable inputs from their environment and use those inputs to re-energize and adapt themselves to suit their changing environments.5 From this perspec- tive, organizations typified or affected by rational or natural orientations will, at best, maintain only them- selves and probably begin to decay when they and their members are unable to react to ongoing changes in their environment or when the environment changes such that what they do no longer produces feedback from the environment.

The concepts and ideas in open systems are themselves energizing and provide a vision to work toward as the field of HPT itself grows in its ability to help organizations change. At present, however, our limited understanding of these concepts constricts our ability to convert what we think we know into practice. Pushing on this limit requires that we keep our eyes on those fields where the most research and developments are being done.

SYNTHESIZING AND INDUCING SOME ADVICE FOR HPT PRACTITIONERS Aside from aiding the identification of organizational types, as indicated above, we can also use the above as tools for analyzing organizational and individual perfor- mance in a given system. Rational organizational types are usually dominated by rules that put economic interests and compliance with those rules at a premium. However, because such systems are easily upset by changes happen- ing outside of the organization, they are perhaps best- suited to subsystems that are largely sheltered from social, cultural, and other shifts within larger systems and which, after sufficient analysis, are considered necessary for the maintenance of the organization. On the other hand, if it is discovered that organizational problems are attributa- ble to overdependence upon or misplaced rational system focus, then it may be useful to begin acting to move the organization to adopt other types.

The natural organization is typified by goal complexity and an analogous relation to biological organisms, with their aims of homeostasis and self-preservation. Ideally, natural systems can respond to internal and external envi- ronments. It is also not uncommon for the natural type organization to prioritize its own self-preservation over adaptation. Therefore, natural type subsystems or systems may be suitable when an organization has created rational type subsystems internal to the organization that must be somehow insulated from internal and external changes— layers of natural subsystems might be able to provide this sort of protection even while absorbing or adapting to cer- tain types of changes. At the same time, if an organization becomes so insular in its own self-interests and ceases to

be able to respond to changes in its environment or even tries to change its environment to suit its current form, an HPT practitioner may find it appropriate to shift some of the organization toward a more open system type. In other cases, allowing members’ authority over certain changes in an organization may actually be detrimental and, in turn, it may help an organization if it were somewhat more rational in some functions.

Like rational and natural types, the open systems type is not actually one type at all, but a collection of charac- teristics that can be found to exist in some measure every- where in the physical world. However, where rational and natural systems are human creations grounded in our own limited understanding of things, open systems begin to transcend our current ability to know and understand concretely. With that in mind, our ability to fashion organizations to approximate advanced types of open sys- tems may have to wait for our ability to conceive of them in more operational ways. Knowledge collected from many disconnected research projects performed under the rational or natural paradigms is perhaps not sufficient to allow one to create an open system that transcends the limited focus of most organizational research.

We can also say that in a metaphorical genealogy of organizations as affected by historical precedents and accrued knowledge, we should expect to see elements of rational, natural, and perhaps even some aspects of open systems everywhere HPT work is performed. However, we should also resist the notion that any of these three

However, we should also resist the notion that any of these three perspectives is universally right or best. Rather, we should help organizations to become less like any one of these three types and more like an amalgam, which suits existing conditions at multiple levels.

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perspectives is universally right or best. Rather, we should help organizations to become less like any one of these three types and more like an amalgam, which suits exist- ing conditions at multiple levels (Scott, 2003).

Above this, the survival of HPT may even rely on a more well-rounded understanding of the many different types of systems we may encounter and not being a one- trick-pony when it comes to our attempts to be effective and relevant social actors. We, too, should look outside our boundaries to learn things that we can turn into an energizing force, which can, in turn, be brought to our work. The field of organizational sociology and its formu- lation of rational, natural, and open systems types is per- haps one such source of new ideas that can help us do more as we learn more.

Notes

1. There is no necessary relation between rational systems and goodness or appropriateness of methods or goals. A rational approach can be adopted to accomplish entirely irrational or damaging ends.

2. Peter Drucker indicated that rather than the reason for doing business, profit is an effect of an organization accom- plishing its actual goals—serving the interests of customers and clients, the society in which it exists and its members (Drucker, 2001).

3. Before coming to the United States, some of Mayo’s research was aimed at understanding the effects of collectivist social and cultural systems common among Australian Aboriginal peoples.

4. Interestingly, some of the most mathematically advanced contemporary research on open systems (going by the names adaptive systems, genetic algorithms, and multi-agent systems) takes a fundamentally microeconomic or rational-actor approach (Epstein, 2006; Epstein & Axtell, 1996; Holland, 1995, 1998). The efficacy of this has yet to be determined.

5. We see this in exemplary individuals and organizations, but following the rational-type foundation of HPT, we often attempt to convert the exemplary performer’s knowledge, skills, and attitudes to a set of specific rules, which we then try to inculcate into others.

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DONALD J. WINIECKI, EdD, PhD, is professor in the instructional and performance technology department and adjunct professor in the sociology department at Boise State University. He holds a Doctor of Education degree in instructional technology and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in sociol- ogy. His research focuses on the effects and affects of technologies and technocentric belief systems in society. He teaches courses in needs assessment, ethnographic research in organizations, and the sociology of science, technology, and engineering. He may be reached at [email protected].

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