Organizations as Machine or Living System
Organization as Machine or Complex Adaptive System |
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Organizations as Machine |
Organization as Living System with a Brain |
Goals and directions are imposed from outside or above |
Goals and processes to serve those goals emerge to satisfy organization needs and mission |
Centralized power authority |
Decentralized authority distributed power |
Leaders as authoritarians |
Leaders promote participatory processes and influence decision making, goals, and means |
Decisions are made above and communicated as instructions to be carried out below |
Processes in place for shared decision making |
Exerting control is primary job of managers |
Managers promote self-organizing properties of organization |
Lines of authority |
Circles of accountability |
Employees expected to do as they are told |
Direct and open communication and feedback views as essential |
Fixed division of tasks |
Flexibility of role definitions with overlap |
When something needs to be fixed, somebody has to fix it |
The system adapts and self-organizes repair and restoration |
Hierarchical supervision |
360 ° supervision |
Detailed rules and regulations |
Detailed processes, flexible rules |
Break work down into smallest parts |
Consideration of the whole |
Command and control language |
Language related to living system metaphor – feedback, feelings, thoughts, ideas, movement, growth, future, change, learning |
People are hired to operate machine and everyone is expected to behave in a predetermined way |
People are hired to help improve functioning of the whole organization with specific tasks and responsibilities |
Machine is owned by someone |
Can anyone own a living system? |
Machine doesn’t learn |
Living systems learn, grow, adapt and evolve |
Adapted from A. deGeus, The Living Company and G. Morgan, Images of Organization. [2, 7] |
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