Frederic Kwesi Great Agboletey
Sweden.
A Locus of Implementation Model of Enquiry of Adaptive Change
Introduction
This paper attempts to model fluid organisational states occasioning organisational change
implementation employing an innovative configuration of wax structures which are representative
structuring to define dynamic system states, where self determined structural emergence depending on
the dependent link interrelations that determine event actualisation in organisational task
accomplishments can be detailed and mapped for facilitating clarity. The modelling effort is based on
delineating at any particular task unit level configuration all the other identifiable organisational units
that are engaged in co-dependent resource and informational exchange process with the unit under
consideration to generate a productive activity framework within which task goals are accomplished.
The situational defined emergent model thus derived, enable prescient, precise definition of which
exchange dependent process define an organisational activity state and how the aggregating influences
determine the unit task quality within an adaptive change situation.
The impetus to derive a process model arose out of an earlier research on adaptive change in the
manufacturing where the interviewers attempted to relate the perceived need for change in terms of
detected influences from within and without the organisation and implied adaptive change success in
relation to the nature of interdependency activities within and without the organisation. Since existing
literature accessed lacked adequacy for effective interpretation of such interviewee perspectives to carry
across the nature of adaptive change, the wax structure gradually evolved as the writer attempted to
evolve an effective approach for representing fluid states in dynamic organisational states. Where the
unit of activity becomes a focus around which relevancy is generated and action consequences defined
with wider organisational consequences.
Formal organisational structure, it is conceivable are simplifications derived to structure fluid
interaction dynamism and give predictability and meaningful stability to otherwise complexly
determined interaction along constantly changing interfaces. Formal constructs of hierarchically
organised dependency relations in that sense have just that much verifiability as being truly
representative of the organisation. In some instances a breakdown through defragmentation of formal
structures to configure meaningful aggregation at lower levels of task unit and generating interaction
patterns of unit dependent interactivity as the basis for defining complex dynamic structures is
inevitable. Since such lower level representation enables more adequate states for dependent cluster
activity delineation and interpretation as complexly structured systems are deliberately broken down for
system analysis. The convergence of value definition at these lower levels of system constituency being
the adequate level for understanding the characteristics defining the outcome state of complex
structures.
The importance of being able to identify and designate the exact point of interaction within a complexly
related structure where action of change implementation is effected and proceeds to permeate system
wide state may depend on the extent to which eliminating of vagueness by focused detailing of action
emergence and consequence in multi-layered indicative system constructs underlie clear concept
development pertaining to a research or organisational study. Inarguably, however, indeterminacy of
action origin undermines accuracy of interpretation and may lead to gross over generalisation and
organisational issue analysis at less than precise sources of action implementation, which though may
generate equally viable results is just as prone to bifurcation and imprecision. By narrowing down on
adaptive change implementation locus and generating interdependent loci of influence, detailing the
exact nature of such interdependency effective adaptive change modelling is able to concretise adaptive
change action emergence, action instigated response reaction at source of adaptive change
implementation and the consequences thereof as it influences the overall system. Which is what this
paper aspires to achieve.
1
The manufacturing organisation by constitution is that organised and managed grouping of humans
employing machinery or a form of technological application to achieve certain ends. Which mainly in
the manufacturing sector consists of importing in raw materials to be processed by the installed
machinery to achieve the ´production ends for which that organisation exists to meet. The products thus
processed are then released into potential consumer markets of that manufactured product.
Manufacturing thus is the employment of machinery to change the primary state of any imported
material to a new state of potential utility value for which there exists a consumers’ market. The
manufacturers expect profits from the products they sale. Though a manufacturing organisation may
have processed materials as raw material inputs to meet its ends, as at the point of acquisition, such
inputs are seen as raw materials for the internal processing by that manufacturing organisation.
An organisation basically is the physical implementation of an idea from its emergence in the mind of
an individual or group of individuals, who then acquire the financial resources to acquire the physical
location where a structure constituting the physical infrastructure within which machinery acquired, is
mounted, workers employed to man those machineries and a group of men with the adequate
managerial knowledge background are employed to manage over those manning the machinery.
Simply put, the manufacturing organisation is a physical entity housing machinery and employees,
processing material inputs, imported from any of a variety of external environments to be processed by
the installed machinery through a series of complex processes to produce a desired end product that is
then exported to that manufacturing organisation’s consumers market to be sold and the monetary
resources thus generated, used to acquire material inputs, pay the employees, maintain the physical
infrastructure and the machinery that the organisation maintains to enable its primary activities. From
an initial position where the organisation owners have to acquire financial resources, either by
borrowing or from saved resources to establish the organisation, the organisation once it has exhausted
that initial establishing funding has to sustain its survival by the successful acquisition of input
resources through profit generated on earlier product sales.
An effective management body that is able to align the needs of the workforce with its organisational
resources to ensure the best possible combination of employee and organisational resources to establish
the amenable environment within which the organisation engages in its primary production activities
and the finished products then exported into the consumers market by an effective marketing
department that increases awareness of the product assisted by the sales department, who engage in the
actual delivery and receipt of payment for goods delivered unto consumers or wholesalers as the case
may be. The products successfully sold and perennially desired by consumers is what generates the
resources that the organisation needs to function as a viable entity.
These chain of complex interaction at many levels with varied and changing interacting interfaces both
within and without the organisation as a defined entity has created a complex
human-machinery/technology multiple interfaces which is the area of academic and research interest in
organisations and on the reverse, the applied employment of acquired knowledge for many students of
organisations in a variety of academic areas and professional fields. For all these variety of fields and
their different perspectives on a common field of interest, the commonality that binds the variety
together and that by default make all these varied knowledge defined fields of differences, shared
partners in understanding the unique situational definition of humans in the social setting of productive
environments is the fact that all these diversified fields are studying the “working work place”, be it
manufacturing industries, educational institutions, service institutions or any other place where humans
gather under organised circumstances to realise a defined outcome state.
The dynamic nature of the human-machinery interface; the unexpected consequences that develop when
humans gather within socially defined settings to realise common ends of individual or group based
allocated tasks evolves new states of being for the humans who work in the organisation. Consequently,
requiring new frames of interpretation of the unique social setting that the organisation is.
The organisation itself, as an entity or a collection of identified units in a global, continental, regional,
national and local environments, all generate independent and interrelated expressive states that
influence their inner constituent state, the environments within which they acquire their resource inputs
and export their products, and the collection of organisations producing similar products, employing the
same raw materials and exporting into the same markets.
The organisation, the technology and the machinery, the human elements that work within its defined
physical construct, the policy making external environments, the resource (considered in the broadest
possible sense) import environment, the labour acquisition environment, the processed product out put
environment, are all in dynamic states of constant variation from any given state of comparability and
affect any organisation in any of a variety of manners, both expected and thus predictable and
consequently capable of being reacted to with the appropriate set of responses, and unexpected, thus
poorly predictable, consequently, unexpected in manifestation and under the best of circumstances
being absorbed by slack resources developed by the organisation in quest to provide a buffer against the
unexpected.
These variety of activity sets generated as a consequence of the complex and dynamic social system of
interdependency created in the wake of the primary goal of making a product for society and deriving
profits from those products have created certain dynamics that are tangential to the primary function of
production but impact the total outcome state of the organisation and thus become the concern of both
the organisation’s management body and students of organisations. For the most part, significant
aspects of management activities revolve around attempts to resolve rising issues of collectives of
humans interacting at common interfaces to realise commonly shared ends. These tangential activities
other than applying human labour and mind to operating machinery to produce goods or render services
have made the working place a unique social environment with its own distinctive social dynamics.
More often than not, managers have found that what makes an organisation successful in
attaining its primary objectives, requires a careful balancing of the production technology, the
internal resource dispersion of the organisation and the creation of the working milieu that
minimises social friction while enhancing the sense of shared collective ownership and
responsibility across the organisation’s span. However this relates only to the internal
organisational environment.
1-2 The Organisation’s External Environment
Organisations also exist in an external environment that directly or indirectly affects their day-to-day
operations, medium term organisational state and long-term survival.
The organisation is an integrated entity, which at any one time is interacting dependently with any of its
several identifiable external environments. The organisation by itself constitutes an element of the
external environment for other organisations. However, as an identifiable entity, the organisation is
affected and affects other identifiable elements of the “world” in which it exists. The external
environment of an organisation for obvious reasons of nature of direct impact on day-to-day
organisational operation can be separated into two broad layers of immediate or task environment and
the distant or general external environment.
What constitutes these two types of environments for an organisation depends on the nature of an
organisation’s activities and consequently what elements of the external environment the organisation
must interact with and/or pay attention to, to enable it operate successfully.
Those aspects of the environment that the organisation has direct contact and interaction with constitute
the immediate environment; changes in these aspects of the external environment have immediate and
direct impact on the organisation. Thus organisations are required to monitor these elements of the
external environment to enable them generate the appropriate set of responses to counterbalances
departures from the assumed norms in these environments. Inasmuch as human systems are dynamic,
constantly changing, there is an element of stability and predictability built in these human systems and
it is this predictability that allows an organisation to plan meaningfully, whether it is in terms of how
much to allocate for purchasing raw material inputs or producing certain amount of goods.
In some instances the organisation through its representatives directly interact with these environments
and thus can feed-into the management decision making process the state or more appropriately the
perceived state of that environment. In other instances, an immediate external environment may have
direct, daily consequences for an organisation but the organisation my not have any direct or
determinant influence, albeit it is influenced by that aspect of the external environment of the
organisation’s immediate external environment. The organisation in that case would have to find a
means of gaining adequate information on the nature of that environment and its influence on the
organisation through third parties.
The organisation as a defined entity, formally registered, having a physical presence and infrastructure,
with machinery, furniture, technological gadgets to assist its human constituents is a physical reality in
most instances but it finds actual expression through its human components, who have been allocated
tasks aimed at meeting the goals of that organisation. Thus, in many instances, a single, powerful
individual, powerful in terms of their organisational role can and do assume the expressive totality of
the organisation.
Since the various aspects of an organisation, at different times, in relation to the nature of task activity
at the focus of interest, variedly express this nature of organisation, the broad descriptive term
organisation, when employed in the study of organisations is more or less giving expression to some
form of activity sphere of some or all of the totality of the organisation, orchestrated such that each
member playing its role on its production machinery or technology assisted production device
complement the individual effort of the rest, which collective activities combine to define the various
sub-system activities aggregating to define the total organisational system.
The range of changes, that when detected through immediate environmental monitoring can be
responded to by the organisation to maintain the organisation on an even keel often fall into a range of
possibilities. Beyond this range that is determined by organisational resource capabilities, there is not
much by way of effective response that the organisation can initiate, to effectively respond to the
pressure for organisational adaptation other than to employ the available resources for system
containment to safeguard collapse. But these are under extreme circumstances of unusual changes in
the organisation’s immediate environment.
The general external environment include those aspects of the overall environment in which the
organisation exists that may occasionally influence the organisation but do not demand a close, constant
attention to. The government’s economic policy of the country in which an organisation exists is one
example. The general performance of the stock market, changes in the cost of fuel prices is all good
examples of the general external environment of an organisation.
The organisation as it is obvious may face changing categorisations of what constitutes its immediate or
task environment and its general external environment, based solely on the qualification of what aspects
of non-organisational elements require immediate and constant attention by an organisation to enable it
to have effective and predictable control over its day-to-day operations. Sudden, unexpected weather
changes such as catastrophic hurricanes, land-ward bound may change the weather and its
consequences from being a very distant organisational environmental concern, to an immediate concern,
requiring maximal informational resources to understand its impact on the organisation's survival.
Outside this extreme example is the fact that in turbulent environments, the environmental factors that
would normally, in more economically stable environments be considered as part of the distant
environment become aspects of the immediate or task environment.
1-3 How Changes in the Environment Influence Organisations
Each of the external environments within which an organisation exists exercises some form of
influential pressure on the organisation’s state of existence. The organisation in turn makes internal
adjustments in response to this influence, or pressure to be able to maintain internal stability as it
pursues its goals.
Given the multiplicity of functional units that constitute the typical organisation, all of which units must
interact at many common fronts to generate an expected organisational state, and taking into
consideration that organisations have to take into consideration various environments, some of which
must be monitored closely, interacted with on an almost daily basis and others which are acknowledged
but barely directly impacting on daily organisation actions, it can be concluded that organisations are
complex compositions of humans and machinery interacting as multiple constituents units interacting
with multiple environments.
Complexity as emergent within the organisation and its external interactions is mainly due to the
number and the interconnectedness of the influential nature of interactions more than it relates to
inability to comprehend these external interconnections.
Indeed what makes the organisation-external environment complex is its shifting nature (in a related
sense), of all the factors that are operable in the organisation and its environment and in some instances
the instability experienced in some of these external environments. In addition to this, not all of the
specific factor constituents impinging on an organisation are immediately obvious and calibrated
against their impact on the organisation.
What is referred to, as an organisation's external environment might not necessarily, directly refer to a
physical state as to an informational state or a state of knowledge that in finding expression redefines
an organisation's realities. Thus constant technological progressions in reference to industries in the
technological products sector is a state of awareness that keeps research and the push for innovation in
a high state of activity in organisations in the technological products sector. While, for example in the
sugar manufacturing industry technological change may be of lesser relevance.
What is obvious however is that the typical organisation is open to a variety of environments, from
aspects of which environment it acquires the resources needed to feed its internal resource processing
activities and into which it exports finished products. The organisation not only acquires physical
resources from its environment, but it also acquires information needed to make management decisions.
The environment of organisations can be categorised for easy reference into the technological
environment, the economic environment, the socio-political environment, and the cultural environment.
An organisation’s environment can be categorised for purposes of easy interpretation into stable and
predictable; predictable but constantly changing or turbulent and highly unpredictable. While the
characteristics of an organisation’s environment can be interpretable from the socio-economic system
within which an organisation finds itself, the organisation's environment is best defined against the
unique characteristics of the organisation and its products. Thus from the earlier cited example of sugar
and maybe a telephone manufacturing company, the socio-economic system may be the same but the
unique organisational environments, arising from competitors pressure, technological progress and
ability to be innovative in product design and market niche acquisition may be completely different,
Indeed, industry localisation in terms of national identity, resource acquisition source and consumers
market may be considered rendered nonsensical given the unrestricted access to information and
awareness created in the wake of globalisation and international trade laws that promote free trade, not
to mention the less critical but significant influence of ease of global information access enabled
through the Internet.
Thus to understand or comprehend the organisation as an open system in constant interaction with its
environment, there is the need to be able to detail the external forces which impact an organisation,
which aspects of the environment these determinant forces emerge from, how these influences decisively
influence the organisation in its primary goal pursuits and how the organisation can integrate these
knowledge into effective running of the organisation. In those instances that the organisation can
influence these external influences, full knowledge of the external influences will enable the
organisation to shape these influences to its benefit.
In adaptive change response, full knowledge of the external environment conceived in terms of its
influence and impact and how the organisation can and should respond to integrate these externally
emergent information into designing and executing appropriate organisational states cannot be
under-estimated.
The next section takes a look at theoretical models of the wider organisational environment. In seeking
to give interpretation to this environment, the reader must necessarily take into consideration that, there
is no one single organisational environment and neither do all of an organisations various sub-systems
deal with similar environments at the same time and there is the need to acknowledge that even in the
immediate external environment of an organisation, certain aspects of that environment may have more
relevance to sections of the organisation than others, however, the collective of these separate
environments must be analytical combined to give a discernible expression of the organisation's external
environment.
1-4 Characteristics and Models of the Organisation's Environment
The organisation exists in an external environment; this environment is basically the organisation's
resource acquisition environment, which encompasses also organisational system influencing
informational sources.
In giving expression to the collective environment, Duncan (1972; 1973) presented an interesting
characterization of the various types of external environment an organisation can face. In a four face
combination of two dimensions of complexity and simple, on the one hand as against static and
dynamic, he elicited a tabular model of the characteristics of the four emergent environmental state, in
the two by two combinations of likely states of the two dimensions and their characteristics, detailing
the characteristics likely to occasion each of the four environments an organisation could face and
suggested the response best suited to each environment.
According to Duncan's model, the highest perceived uncertainty is emergent in environments that are
both complex and unstable, whereas an organisation in a complex but stable environment is able to
predicate and anticipate its environmental influences. In terms of application to adaptive change where
the pressure for change may be emerging from the external environment, Duncan's model enables a
basis for environmental analysis interpretation when cast in the perception therein evolved and provides
a means for nature of assumptions an organisation must make towards an interpreted environment.
Unstable-dynamic environments call for a more agile management strategy as regards response to
external environment pressures than stable and complex environments.
Appropriate interpretation of degree of certainty or uncertainty a decision choice offers management
may determine appropriate management strategic orientation in respect to the manner the organisation's
environment is interpreted, and such interpretations are conditional to effective management response,
to both the external and the internal environmental demands of the organisation.
Thompson's (1967) analysis of decision making strategy as a function of (1) goal consensus among the
dominant coalitions in an organisation and (2) the degree to which there is a certainty about how to
accomplish a given goal. By combining it with the dimension of certainty and uncertainty as articulated,
(while suppressing for the time being) the social consensus, social system underpinning of organisation
effective derived states, within which the theories and models were generated) a powerful taxonomy of
managerial decision types can be derived, within which the nature of social system characterizing an
organisation can be configured for more effective decisional choice strategies, in response to emerging
organisational needs.
1) Computational: If there is a high goal consensus and high certainty about how to achieve goals, one
can routinise decision making much as one routinises mathematical problem solving once the rules are
known. Thus a shared decision the rules are known. Thus a shared decision can be reached to develop a
new product for which the technology is known and for which a clear market exists.
2) Compromise: If there is a high certainty about how to achieve various different kinds of goals but
low consensus on which goals should be sought, management finds itself having to make compromises
and engage in various kinds of bargaining behaviour of the kind that Cyert and March identified. One
such situation might be compromise on which of several products to develop where the technology for
each is well known but where lack of consensus exists on the size of the profit margins each will yield
in the short and long run.
3. Judgmental: If there is high goal consensus but the environmental organisational interaction is such
that there is low certainty about how to achieve a given goal, what is needed is good judgment on how
to maximize the probabilities of desired outcomes and minimise the probabilities of undesired
outcomes. Thus, judgment is needed where the market for given product is clear and where profit goals
are clearly agreed upon but the costs of developing the product are highly uncertain because of
changing technology.
4. Inspirational: If there is neither consensus on goals, nor any degree of certainty on how to achieve a
given goal, what is needed is an inspirational leader who combines the ability to pull diverse coalitions
together and the judgment to make the decisions with the highest probabilities of desired outcomes. The
decisions that entrepreneurs make in the face of high environmental uncertainty to go ahead with certain
products and market strategies are of this type.
The relevance of the two models outlined here is in terms of their indication of the relative degrees of
variations in situational variations in different organisations and different organisational situations.
They also prepare management for the need for a more contingent response orientation in organisational
response strategies. With induced decision making flexibility increasing as predictability and certainty
diminishes. These two models enable a reference framework within which contingent modeling can find
a reference and combined with the Spider maps, enable the generation of functional task related
structures that define the intricacies of resource acquisition interactions to be considered in unit task
adaptation efforts.
Much as management has been described as a consensual approximation process (Agboletey, 2001),
the practical requirements of large and micro system management are no doubt enhanced by proper
delineation of the various influences determining an organisational situation, whether that situation is a
production process or a social system management situation, and how these individual influences
combine to determine that organisational situation of interest and consideration. The management is
then left with how to determine with situational role players the most appropriate situational
determinant variable (s) combination within the resource provisions affordable by the organisation, to
enact the desired outcome state that is mutually supportive of individual role players and the
organisation's goals. The best combination of organisational resources, employee considerations and
management opinion yields under all circumstances the best outcome state rather preponderance to one
over the other. It gives credence to the long held notion of management, one indeed which defined the
contingency theorisation movement that there is no one best or "all time correct way" to organise; the
exigencies of the situation determine the best action response set. The internal state considerations
require effective integration of external environment impositions to derive desired states all round.
1-5 Organisational Structure
Formal Organisational structure represents the way in which an organisation integrates various levels
of its total human constituency into a framework of positional dependencies and interaction formats,
often visibly presented as an Organisational framework.
In its actual expression, an organisation’s structure is best described as the formal definition
representing a less precise form of organic interaction pattern of task based interaction pattern
necessary in the organisation. The formal organisational arrangement of structured layers yields
optimum organisational benefit where it is able to define operational environments where ease of access
facilitates unhindered communication across levels in the formal structures. As stated earlier this
facilitates the approximation of formal operational targets without undermining the less cohesive
informal social characteristics of the organisations employees. Seeking to establish working norms that
enable the informal perspective to not only share but also actually give credence to a formal
management perspective is the benchmark of management efficiency; one that is easier expressed that
formally realised.
2
2-1 Open Loop Decision Making (Social Arrangements Around
Technology and Machinery)
The notion of open-loop being suggested here simply implies that within the formal decision and
responsibility hierarchy of formal organisational structures the decision making process be conceived as
an all encompassing participative engagement, rather than being a uni-linear transfer of directives from
upper to lower levels or from management to operations.
The notion of organisations as socio-technical systems has been an organisational awareness since the
1950's and it is a relevant awareness. The workplace is a social setting where value aggregates around
socially mediated states. The technology is a given and the personnel assigned to the jobs are barely
self-selective other than as per pre-specified background requirements for the task in question. The
nature of exchange relationships that evolves between the personnel may be task based to significant
extents, but there is a cogent social dimension to exchange relationships at the workplace that
determines the quality of work and the employees’ satisfaction with their work setting.
One important consideration of management is how to gain appreciation of the expectations of
employees, their aspirations as they expect it to be fulfilled in the organisation, how their values as
regard work and life merge with the employing organisation's ´work philosophy, and how informal
group norms and norms deriving from workplace interaction support or undermine organisational goals.
The organisation thus has to be able to ascertain these various states of the employee through “mutually
engaged” management techniques, which integrates the employee with the organisation rather than the
organisation seeing its employees as mere productive resources. Obvious as this is, many organisational
problems result from discordances that arise from deviances in these primary human needs and an
organisation’s management impositions. The suggestion being made here is that under normal
circumstances, individuals who enter into employment at any workplace should be seen and treated as
much as part owners as those who have invested financial resources to set up the organisation and need
to be seen in that light as part owners who must be engaged in mutual establishment of the
organisational system state and conditions whereby all needs are met under the best conditions that
make the organisation and its employees collective winners in the value creation effort of resource
processing.
Clearly, whatever an individual's view of reality before joining an organisation, those views and
cultivated norms are capable of being influenced and positively changed to the benefit of the
organisation under the appropriate conditions. (On the reverse, employees can be subtly influenced
correctly or incorrectly by informal group viewpoints to interpret the organisation along any of variety
of assumptions that work contrary to organisational expectations).
Clearly, there is preponderant evidence that the employee's capacities, preferences and expectations
cannot be taken as a given, but these are factor variables that are influenced by the organisational
context and capable of being influenced decisively by management practices and the contingencies of
the working environment and its provisional state, positively or negatively.
The immediate implication of this is that the organisation must design primary job functions with the
intention of positively influencing its employees and structure the work groups into an organisational
system structure that is responsive to the employees needs and make employees sensitive to
organisation system expectation, creating interfaces where these two major organisational forces can
interact with reduced friction.
Thus this awareness of the organisation being an open, socio-technical system, enables management to
constantly pose the guiding question in organisational system design and the adjustment thereof in
response to changing circumstances, and the inevitable pressures for general system adjustment in
response to internal and external pressures for adjustment; "what combination of technology,
management influenced employee attitude and conformed organisational structures would enable the
most effective state of organisation framework around which individuals and groups interact to realise
their required tasks?
The intention of this guiding question will enable an organisation's management to ascertain how the
influence of the different informational inputs determining employee perspectives and influencing the
organisational state in reference to the primary task accomplishment of that organisation, the resource
utilisation demands these influences of the organisation and the organisations available resources set
against the technological developments and existing acquired technological level of a particular
organisation could be employed in determining what best fit could be enabled in task configuration into
total organisational system.
These considerations among others enable the configuration of the most appropriate work methods that
under the desirable considerations would allow technology and machinery to be responsive to the social
needs of humans grouped around tasks. Allowing these groupings to be integrated into supervisory and
management supportive systems to define the most appropriate organisational social system that would
support the organisation structure designated to interlink persons in various positions of responsibilities
in the organisation.
The basic consideration in realising the desired organisational social milieu that is both supportive of
the social needs of employees and capable of generating management production targets within the
circumscriptions of the existing organisation conditions can best be facilitated by bringing employees at
all levels in the organisation into primary task decision making and discussing ways of facilitating the
appropriate working environment within the limitations of organisational resources.
Open loop decision-making will encourage employees to express their opinions on management
suggestions. There is no best way to manage but there are well-tested approaches that have consistently
yielded desired employee reaction in terms of attitude to work and the employer. Management practices
are based on individual management philosophies as to the best way to manage integrated into formal
assumptions of what is currently deemed appropriate and best, as well as analysis of total
organisational system, which situational state might suggest what is most appropriate in terms of
management orientation, as well as external environment information about what pertains in other
similar organisations. These serve as input analysis to derive an assumed state of effective mode of
management conduct. Which in turn determines how tasks are organised, employees allotted to the
tasks designated and the control and supervision system set in place to gird employee activities. The
decision loop is opened in that these management conclusions are then open to work groups to confirm
as suitable and employee supportive, both individually and as groups. The organisation in seeking for
employee input, by default, must create meaningful decision influencing room for work group input.
Open loop enables flexibility for employee determination of optimum states for effective productivity
within an expectation framework emanating from an organisation's final decision-making body.
While an organisation's management are positioned to have overview knowledge of overall system and
the various external environments monitored by an organisation and aggregate these information for
decision making, micro-management of work groups are best enabled when the work group itself within
the supportive framework of management expectancies is made to appreciate the wisdom in particular
management decisions as related to a particular work group, rather than being left outside the loop.
This awareness must be mutually acknowledged and considered an aspect of the organisation's
management strategy, a means for overall system stability and optimum productivity to be conceived in
terms of management attempting to cultivate a sense of collective ownership and mutual engagement
among its employees and facilitating the conditions under which management knowledge and
organisational awareness state enables work groups to make the best decisions, with regards to their
peculiar needs in the light of organisational expectations and resources available.
Aspects of an existing production process may have, at times, to be slightly adjusted to enable the best
human-machinery fit. Where these involve the initial outlay of capital, an organisation's management
may have to decide whether short term savings due to unwillingness to invest scarce monetary
resources to adapt machinery, technology or basic infra-structural provisions to yield adequate
employee/task group needs weigh favourably against the long term undetermined consequences of
employee dissatisfaction because of management lack of consideration for employee needs.
It is within that context that the open-loop decision making approach is recommended since it enables a
point of interaction that narrows relevant information to self-selected points of implementation
reference, where the situational awareness capacities of the organisation interact at the narrow
perspectives of work groups/employees to facilitate the corroborative optimum implementation states
for task execution, enabling the development of the socially supportive work setting, as a congruent
state of dynamically negotiated outcome state of management-employee (most likely, task group
mediated) interaction at a common interface for mutually desirable end states, with the resources of the
one giving relevance to the needs of the other.
The fundamental precept under which management employs its vast resources for overall organisational
system-environment monitoring is partly for operational level decisions which must be varied in
response to noticed variations in external as well as internal organisational states. While management
has better oversight and insight as regards the appropriate choice of action to promote the
organisation’s well-being, there is an intrinsic element of task performance that in adaptive change
implementation predisposes management as an external knowledge and advisory content providing an
analytical framework for effective structuring of organisational situational state for effective
implementation. It is within that construct that a need for open loop decision-making is recommended
here.
2-2 Facilitating Adaptive Change
The awareness is mutually shared by both employees and management that, there is no attained state of
perfection for work implementation, rather changing circumstances require changing response patterns
to enable the appropriate adaptive responses for effective implementation taking into consideration the
existing state of technology, employee quality in terms of knowledge base, experience acquired in
reference to their work, conditions existing in competing organisations and the immediate and
extraneous factors emergent that affect the organisation and the organisations resources for facilitating
adaptive change in response to pressures for change. Since that awareness permeates organisations
have set in place the response mechanisms that facilitate the dynamic negotiation framework within
which adjustments are facilitated by the organisation for its work groups.
Awareness of a need for change in response to changing circumstances that require a response from the
organisation and the changing nature of response patterns and type of responses initiated as
implementation measures to cope with unsupportive internal and external systems, whose supportive
adequacy as organisational system productive mechanisms have been eroded by emergent states, imply
that not only are organisations required to make adjustments, updates, retooling to improve worn
machinery, change technology systems to improve on productivity, introduce new products more in tune
with what consumers desire or to maintain market niche etc, but also the actual nature of change to be
adopted is an adaptive change response open to creative choice based on situational circumscriptions.
The precise modus operandi with regards to any adaptive change must necessarily be situation defined
(decision consensus implementation may take a cue from an existing knowledge framework but each
execution is a variation on a norm and must be acknowledged as such, if its nuances are to identified,
and catalogued as reference material). It must be noted that the very organisational system precludes a
null state of reference for any organisational action. The organisation finds existence and sustenance
within a state of assumption that determines action state and determines effect state and consequently
the existing state of the organisation. Understanding what these states are, is of considerable influence
in effective management. On the other hand, assuming that this state is a given can seriously undermine
all efforts to make the necessary adaptations that changing circumstances require of the organisation’s
production and social system.
2-3 Process Management Within Dynamic Organisational Construct
An organisational process has been defined as “a set of activities that, taken together, produce a result
of value to a customer (Ittner & Lacker, 1997). An organisational process can be seen as the underlying
routines and procedures that guide organisational activities (Nelson & Winter, 1982). The explicit
focus on repeating and continuously improving existing organisational capabilities (Garvin, 1995) can
be seen as first order learning, which is likely to increase the coordination, interdependence and
efficiency of the processes. Benner (1999) opines that this focus on the improvement and refinement of
the existing capabilities is likely to affect the balance between exploitative and exploratory activities.
He further observes that as process management is explicitly focused on exploiting and extending
current organisational capabilities, incremental forms of innovation are likely as an organisation
extends its current technological capabilities. In organisational external environments where
technological change is comparatively rapid, adaptation in those environments require the appropriate
form of technological change response within the organisation. During periods of incremental
technological innovation in the environment, the internal organisation focus on incremental innovation
to parallel external developments is likely to contribute successful adaptation through internal
adjustments to reflect the external developments.
Process management has been widely adopted by organisations in the past decade, often in the form of
programs like Total Quality Management (TQM), ISO 9000, the Malcolm Baldbridge National Quality
Award and Business Process Reengineering. As a process, it is a statistically derived value
implementation to integrate efficiency into the work process (Benner, 1991).
While these approaches are generally intended to increase organisational efficiency and performance
such expectations have not been consistently borne out in empirical studies of the process management
(Powell, 1995). One explanation for the conflicting research results on process management, Benner,
contends, may emerge from considerations of both the stage of technological innovation in an
organisation and the effects of process management on organisational response to technological change.
Process management, it has been noted, has the potential to slow the organisational to more radical
technological change, both by increasing organisational inertia and by channelling innovation into
incremental forms impeding responsiveness in the face of radical changes in technology. In the same
breath it is highly commended for increasing internal operational efficiency through incremental
adaptation in an organisation. However, he notes a focus on incremental innovation and improvement in
organisations can affect an organisations ability to recognise and adapt to technological change.
Henderson & Clarke (1990) found that organisations responded to technological change with
incremental extensions of current technology. Their study further found that process management
further exacerbated such a tendency.
Benner (1991) reviewing literature from the field of Organisational Theory, focusing on subject areas
of adaptation, innovation and organisational learning, attempted to develop a conceptual argument for
process management in organisations and its influence on adaptation to technological change. He
argues that process management influences an organisation’s adaptability capacity through its effects
on inertia and innovation. Supporting research that has examined the factors within organisations that
influence adaptation to changing technology (such as those of Christensen & Bower, 1996; Henderson
& Clark, 1990; Tushman & O’Reilly, 1997).
The combination of increased efficiency due to the “ping response effect” of matching internal states to
external developments and the consequent incremental innovation within the organisation is likely to
result in performance benefits for the organisation in periods of incremental change.
Itter & Locker (1997) found performance benefits associated with process management techniques for
firms in the automobile industry but found process management was negatively associated for firms in
the computer industry. Benner (1990) concludes that one possible explanation for this finding may lie in
the differences in technological change between the two environments.
Hackman &Wageman (1995) note that process management may exist as rhetoric in an organisation
because of its social desirability, thus the term may be touted without effective implementation. They
further contend that, efforts to assess the true extent of adoption, separated from socially desirable
responses, may require extensive observation of organisational activities.
2-4 Particularisation of Complex Dynamic Systems
Organisations are constantly evolving due to their interaction consequences. With passing time some
organisations expand and become more complexly related in their internal and external interaction and
information exchange processes.
(Galbraith, Kotter & Lawrence and Lorsch all make attempts in their theorisation and modelling efforts
to explicate the dynamic nature of organisations. Galbraith shows how different kinds of organisational
design decisions can be related to information-processing requirements as an organisation grows and
becomes more complex.
Kotter develops a dynamic diagnostic model which ties together many of the structural elements
identified in an organisation and lays a foundation of how to intervene constructively if one wishes to
influence organisations.
Lawrence and Lorsch (1967) focus on the effects of Differentiation and Integration. They imply that
every organisation must determine its optimum degree of differentiation in terms of the particular
characteristics of its different environments and must choose an appropriate means of integration based
on an analysis of which functions give the organisation its particular competitive advantage in the
marketplace.)
While these organisational models aid understanding organisations, they are hardly adequate in
enabling the organisation to detail the breakdowns required in the analysis of pre- and post unit task
adaptation efforts. Pre-adaptive task unit analysis of interaction interfaces coterminous on task
execution is necessary for the organisation to detail the chain of dependency bearing upon the task units
efficient work completion and how these interaction interfaces can be managed to ensure successful
adaptation. Post -adaptive change implementation analysis enables organisation system wide impact
analysis consequent on implemented adaptive change.
The employment of the concept of wax structures as a means for defining functional unit structures and
the detailing of the intricate network of dependent interrelations between the various constituents units
of an organisation serve the additional purpose of breaking down complexity of dependent interrelations
that occasion the organisation to neat bundles of task and situational relevance networks that can be
integrated system wide to define an existing state of the organisation.
The organisation as suggested above is best conceived of as a system of sub-systems in complex
internal and external dependent interaction with a variety of close or immediate and distant external
environments. These external environments determine the internal organisational environment through
the open system resource acquisition and export process, in that they determine how organisations
attempt to derive the best combination of the acquired resources with internal resources to generate
efficient production, while contending with the more difficult social related concerns of enabling the
best working environment for employees.
The organisation, thus is an open, complex system in dynamic interaction with multiple environments,
attempting to fulfil goals and perform tasks at many levels and in varying degrees of complexity,
evolving and developing as the interaction with changing external forces coerce new internal
adaptations.
The organisation needs to be able, at the unit level, define the need for change through process mapping
of 1. What leads to the need for changing an existing state, by tracing the trigger source of the need for
adaptive change; whether internally driven or externally originating. 2. How that need for operational
adjustment can be obviated through adaptive change. 3. Detailing the intricate interaction network that
determines functional relevance of the unit where the need for adaptive adjustment at some operational
level has been identified. 3. Be able to ascertain the availability of internal resources either from within
the unit under consideration or from wider organisational sources to invest in the adaptive change. 4.
Be able to determine how resource importation will be affected and whether such resource import
change can lead to system instability elsewhere in the organisation and ensure that adequate information
transfer into the organisational unit thus affected, where possible is effected with adequate time enabled
such units to adjust their unit centred activities to adapt to the extra unit adaptive action (here the
complex integrative nature of organisations becomes evident; if the adage could be stretched, then one
could say that no organisational unit is an island onto itself). 5. Prepare the employees in that task unit
to accept or share the need for adaptive change 6. Determine how change effects will impact "export"
target of unit production effort; this "export" zone may be another organisational unit. 7. Determine
how the adaptive change will affect the overall organisation and 8. Execute the adaptive change and
ascertain its success rate.
This chain of action processes must be systematically realised, while at each stage the complexities
engaged must be broken down into their simplest possible constituent state and the nature of
interactions chains clearly identified and laid out for understanding the instigator and spread over of the
need for adaptive change on the one hand and implemented change on the other. The adaptive response
effectiveness of any sub-system or sub-system task unit cannot be understood without considering these
multiple interactions, action possibilities, action consequences and functional integration of action along
any of a number of unit interaction interfaces.
The complexity of subsystems constituent unit inter and intra relation, dependency and mutual
influence in terms of action consequence require some form of comprehensive structural breakdown to
facilitate comprehensive analysis. Each adaptive change effort must be considered within a larger
system framework, which framework must be defined according to the situational specification
relevance.
Since, adaptive change is often within a subsystem’s task unit level, even where conceived on a work
group basis, production line or department, it is more often than not focused within a subsystem level
with system adjustments made to accommodate the change. It becomes necessary that the
interdependent relation be specified in detail and the nature of dependent relation effect consequent on
adaptive change detailed at the pre-implementation phase of adaptive change consideration since
interdependency assumes that changes within one unit or sub-system will reverberate across the system
whole.
The organisation - external environment interface is complex and multi-faceted. This introduces another
element of complexity into organisations, since the multiple links between an organisation and its
various environments require multiple interaction and monitoring of all these environments and the
ability to determine their demands and effects on the organisations, organisations are faced with not
only effective information integration at decision making centres but also quick anticipation of how
developments in any of these environments can impact the organisation's short term and long term
survival. In more than a few cases adaptive change in most organisations have more or less been in
response to competitors actions or consumers behaviour or assumptions in regard to these.
The immediate implication of this is that, adaptation effort must be conducted with marked
consideration to the external environment's impositions, constraints and support. Where adaptive
change is oriented towards new product introduction, the ease of product integration into the external
environment’s consumers market requires adequate consideration. For example, a product change will
have no relevance if the consumers market has cause to believe that change from an existing product to
a new one is not worth it. In other words, consumers have always voted with their purchasing power
and more than a few organisations have had cause to regret poorly conceived product adaptations,
when consumers had decided that "new is not always better."
Some organisational units face an organisation's immediate environment and interact with such external
environments, given that adaptive change might be a response to noticed changes in a component or
components of the external environment, the subsystem units that interact directly with these external
elements of the organisation must be able to convey their information to the appropriate decision
making quarters in the organisation for that information to be effectively disseminated into the
organisation. This information monitoring, interception, analysis and integration at strategic
information cellars for organisational decision-making influence, needs to be broken down and made
relevant to any change effort.
2-5 Organisational Internal Complexity
From simple states of conceptualisation as a physical infrastructure housing machinery and the
appropriate technology to be operated by managed hired hands (employees) for realising the goal of
producing specified end products through the manufacturing process to be sold to potential consumers
in identified markets for profitable ends, organisations in their operational states have often turned out
to be complex institutions, influencing their setting, being influenced and internally complicated by the
nature of internal organisational states or naturally emergent interaction patterns consequent on
determinant activity sets in interplay with fluid human characteristics finding diverse forms of
behavioural expression.
Internal complexity arises from the combination of unitary constituency and the various fronts that this
unitary constituencies or their aggregation as working groups, coalescing to form departments or
organisational sub-systems, which sub-systems together form the Organisational system interact to
yield unique organisational characteristics.
The employees of an organisation come from a variety of backgrounds and have their own expectation
to meet at the workplace. Differences in individual perspectives when not submerged to become
insignificant against the greater relevance of task performance as combined effort can create conflict
states that detract from effective performance.
Even when an organisation has clear-cut goals and the management machinery that enables a
disciplined and productive work force, the awareness that informal groups always form outside the
formal work group is a well-established nature of workplaces. Unless the management is able to focus
the group through internal state provision of amiable working environment, where discrepancies
between organisational expectations and individual aspirations as enabled within the organisation are
not far apart, these informal groups of self defined interests aggregating at common interfaces to find
social expression in the organisation can undermine the best management effort at attaining optimum
production as defined from the organisation's managerial perspective.
(Reader can refer to Hawthorne studies of the 1920's; Mayo (1945; Trist & Bamforth (1951 ).
Organisational complexity must be understood from fundamental perspectives to enable complexly
structured dynamic systems to become manageable and to some extent predictable.
Individuals people the organisation with different perspectives on how a particular function needs to be
performed. Each individual is a constant variation of changing physical, emotional and knowledge
constituent state, and while aspects of the individual may remain fairly predictable (for example,
knowledge background) others such as physical, emotional and psychological states are variable.
Marked variations at the individual employee level may have minor or major organisational influences
depending on what role the particular individual plays in the organisation and whether sufficient role
supporters exist in the working environment to absorb the performance deficiency slack that lower than
expected performance from one person engenders in daily operations.
The employees are normally constituted as work groups structured around a particular task definition
facilitated through needed machinery or technology provisions to enable effective task execution.
Effective task performance or task execution is required of an organisation’s employees on allotted
tasks given the resources and technology made available.
Work or task groups are the primary employee compositions around which tasks are structured in most
organisations or more appropriately in the manufacturing sector. The basis for group formation
depends on the operational setting as structured around the machinery and technology that mediate the
production process. On the other hand, behavioural assumptions of supportive work settings
irrespective of whether the task can be performed by one person or not need not be under-estimated.
The work group normally has a group leader who is responsible to a supervisor who is in charge of that
group and above all the various working groups in the operational theatre of actual production. Above
the supervisor is a layer of management personnel who exercise decisional authority depending on their
role and positional influence. In most manufacturing organisations, these management personnel
including the owner (if it is a young organisation) meet to plan and access the performance of the
organisation.
Management may have fairly simple one or two layers of positions or may be a complex array of
different knowledge fields interacting to enable effective Organisational performance.
The assumption of complexity in dynamic setting requires a simple, accurate and replicable modelling
representation, which the next section discusses.
2-6 Wax Structuring
The assumption that formal organisational structures depicting individuals arrayed in linked hierarchies
of functional and positional role dependent interactions is a true reflection of how organisational roles
actually relate to execute their daily functions is considered by most organisational scholars as an
organisational myth. Formal organisational structures are position related, responsibility placeholders
around which a more diffuse dynamic interaction stream of varying, relevance defined linkages evolve
as different role components are faced with differing task imposed interaction needs with different
environments and different role occupants.
Though the argument could be advanced that for the most part most manufacturing roles revolve
around highly predictable operational practices, it is also the case that some positional role occupants
have to adjust their routines to meet the task imposed demands of varying fronts of interaction and
changing activity schemes, especially those in management role positions. In this sense, while charted
positions have useful role position responsibility reference relevance, actual organisational practices
may require an extrapolation beyond these organisational chart frames to enable understanding of
actual organisational practices if one is to facilitate changes in these practices.
Irrespective of what organisational chart an organisation adopts, it's relevance is compromised and its
actual operational relevance as a predictable tool for detecting interaction patterns is conditional to how
closely actual practices reflect the charted role positions. However, the role responsibilities allocated
and indicated on the organisational chart is more or less the basis for functional implementation and
departures thereof. In daily practice in organisations, interacting unit coalesce at functional interfaces,
which must be defined to be able to accurately determine the variables of interaction to determine unit
state within the framework of the larger systemic whole. A process breakdown and analytical definition
that helps in reducing other wise complex activities aggregating unto an adaptive change
implementation task unit into a simple frameworks.
The actual patterns of an organisation evolving interaction pattern is of relative importance both in
practical terms and in terms of organisational research interest. An organisation's functional units
conceived within wax structures are functional aggregations at nexuses of task interaction, where
interaction is task defined and thus dynamically realised as per task demands. These coalesce of
identifiable units at functional interfaces is more representative of the dynamism that occasions the
activity stream of the organisation and has some relevance in more effective organisational
interpretation and short-term analysis.
What is of prime relevance is that, whatever the eventual emerging structure to define interaction in
relation to any change implemented, it must have certain fundamental characteristics: -
1. The outer layers, which access the environment, must integrate as multiple sided environmental
sensors and interactive units combining their informational resources at a common internal analytic
reference point.
2. The actual zone of integration may more often than not be an informational access zone(s).
3. Internal system states provide a supportive system frame for external sensor, organisation-external
environment interfaces. In other words, any organisation access-to-access external environment
information must have some internal relevance or it is redundant and cannot be integrated into a
supportive internal framework. Properly, conceived, an organisation-external environment interface
exists because it has been internally enabled structural form of expression.
4. Effective internal integration requires the existence of multi-faced interaction zones for each defined
organisation unit, which units interact along several fronts to create a centre of stability that enables it
to maintain a feasible form fronting unto several independently identifiable but interconnected unit
frames, each of which frames define units through system relevance that creates a centre of stability
through organisational functional task relevance through aggregation at centre of multi-channel
resource and informational input to define its existence relevance as a defined organisational unit,
facing adjacent units through relevant interaction of either processed resource transfer or informational
transfer. The unit can be either an individual in a role position or groups in a task role. The interface
thus generated at any defined task requirement informational, resource acquisition and processed
resource export further down the production process generates a wax structure.
5. The wax structure is constantly reforming around task determinacy, some of which may be recurrent
others less recurrent, but all of which must find expressive definite form at all times for the organisation
to exist and yield functional relevance.
6. It is important to not conceive the organisation from the strait jacketed perspective of fixed role
occupants in predictable interactions but rather functional reorganisations around system defined
interactions in the realising the organisation's goals.
7. What constitutes these structures and how they interrelate must be defined for each unique
organisational situation under consideration. Since the elaboration of this wax-structured interfaces or
linkages thereof enable easier breakdown of otherwise complex activity sets over several organisational
units.
8. The organisation as a system is composed of several sub-systems which further breakdown into
departments and sections. The human constitutes in those subsystems aggregate around a task by
employing informational and input resources to be processed as its task responsibilities in a specified
operational medium which completed task is then exported to other organisational system components.
All the needed information and resources of both input nature and export requirements form the
interfaces around which that subsystem, subunit finds operational definition as an organisational unit
cooperating, competing and coordinating with other units to meet its task functional goal.
9. The task functional goal is mediated by the group social climate and the informal group opinion on
the nature of the task execution. The appropriate social medium as opined above can either be left to
find self-expression or can be negotiated at one of the interfaces that define the task group by the
organisation constituent in influential position and thus forms one of the interfaces.
10. This task group social system mediation is indirectly conducted by attempting to define a state of
mutual preference for the group under consideration, through facilitation of group needs along any of a
variety of dimensions, be it task related or social need facilitation through management intervention that
lowers non-task related group conflict due to individual group constituent frictions. The effort is
directed towards enabling through the organisation’s intervention the provision of those group states
and conditions that weigh the groups formal and informal social orientation favourably towards the
organisation and in so doing causes the group to perform at its optimum capacity.
11. Role occupancy is equivalent to work group if the role occupant occupies a strategic role position
that interacts across various role positions. Just as much, an individual management could represent the
organisation as much as collectives could define the organisation.
12. An effective group in effect is a unit consisting of several individuals, while a strategic single role
occupant represents an individual in multiple role position interacting with several interaction
interfaces. The task defines the number of individuals in the unit under consideration but that does not
minimise their contribution as key occupants of relevant and defined units in the organisational system.
13. The wax-structured unit is a defined interface aggregating on a unit performing (a particular) task.
A process aggregation through interaction at a number of interfaces where it obtains the needed
resources of information or material resource input to enable it realise its primary responsibilities,
irrespective of how that unit, operates to realise its task obligations to the organisation. In other words
the unit is defined first by its resource/informational acquisition sources which simply are all the other
identifiable organisational units that unit interacts with and secondly by how these resources are
combined at its core through acquired resource combination with its internal resources, whether those
resources are acquired knowledge state of the individual or the machinery and technology facilitating
processing of the input resources in reference to anticipated or known receptive needs of the
transfer/export zone of the processed acquired input.
14. By way of speaking, wax structures define an organisation in terms of its changing patterns of unit
implementation activities as defined in specified unit interaction with all other system constituents to
enable it conduct its tasks at any specified point in time. Thus considered, while some units may
indicate unchanging interfaces, the likelihood is that changing task needs might result in changing unit
interfaces aggregating to define the interaction interfaces circumscribing that core unit’s task activities.
By the same token the exact resource input and how they are employed for the unit at the core of the
defined wax interface must be elucidated for the model to be complete.
15. While over emphasis on informational/resource input might give an indication of a one way process
of input acquisition, the tentative information and the process of exporting or forward processed inputs
to other organisational sub-system elements is implied.
16. These set of assumptions is very much akin to what is referred to in older literature as role set but
differs from it, in that role set attempts to define with whom a role occupant in fulfilling an
organisational role relates to. These set of people, who could be superiors, subordinates, peers and
outsiders constitute the role set. Wax structures on the other makes reference to how all defined and
detailed interacting interfaces that border a work units resource and informational interface are
functionally linked through material resource and information resource exchange. How these acquired
inputs combined with the internal unit constituency to generate an output value of organisational
benefit, which resource is then exported further through another interface into another sub-system
constituent unit thus generating another interface on the wax structure.
The focus is on the actual interfaces and how they are characterised in reference to that unit and the
organisation as a system. A two level structure is feasible under these circumstances; the one is the
interface and the other is the unit as an entity with its internal working mechanisms in interaction with
other sub-systems to generate these interfaces. Adequacies and inadequacies thereof may be sought
from within the unit in relation to what extent its operational needs are realised from the interfaces thus
engendered by the unit’s unique operational needs that can be accomplished by importing from other
sub-system. Whether such sub-systems are within or without the organisation, they are conceivable
only within the organisational system, since the organisation must per necessity mediate any
organisation-external environment resource/informational acquisition. While informational resources
may be acquired independent of the organisation, depending on the acquiring source that information
must somehow be acknowledged as organisationally relevant and integrated into an accessible database
or informational reference format for generic system employment for applied situational specific
purposes.
17. One of the problems of role sets which the wax structure model attempts to obviate is that analysis
of structure is dynamically responsive to situational mediations of action choice of interfaces defined as
employed and action consequences of post implementation analyses, which will help determine the next
constituent characteristics of the wax structure defined by the unit under consideration.
18. In which sense the dynamic wax structure is defined by a unit's adaptive response to redefine its
unit needs according to task plus situational needs configurations and the identification of system
constituents from which the needed resources can be imported and completed task exported into/to. The
considerations of relevance is basically a) what these identified interfaces are, b) what is acquired from
each and the nature of that resource, c) how these acquired resources are combined with unit resources
to generate an expected outcome, d) where the completed output is heading e) a post production
analysis to ascertain how efficiency was realised in meeting production targets
19. All post production analysis become determinants for the next structure configured as a process in
realisation consequent on actual production.
20. At any point in time, an organisations wax structure which is the totality of actual resource
exchange deliberately engaged in by a unit to facilitate unit production or operational realisation can be
detailed linked to the various interfaces of resource acquisition and made analysable. However, these
wax structures conceivable as modular mappings may be of equally viable relevance in enabling a
sub-system or work group to determine the adaptive response effect in changes manifested at
interaction bearing on unit task realisation.
21. Spider maps, a variation on the spider mapping technique (Hanf, 1971) or planar link surface
diagrams can be adopted to enable extensions of a simple of wax structure. The relevant consideration
is that in determining the critical interaction interfaces it should be possible to determine the influential
informational and resource sources which are needed for unit/ or work group operational task
accomplishment purposes. Spider mapping enables graphic presentation of depth structures in simple
linear diagrams enabling easy reference scheme. This is completely removed from its original use as a
means of mapping structural knowledge or cognitive structures. It is in this instance an application
extension into the organisational adaptation study area.
2-5 Spider Mapping Upon Wax Structured Interfaces
The basic assumption within which wax structures are conceivable is that all of the constituent
organisational system sub-systems and unit components are per necessity identifiable and are defined
within a functional spatial dimension as relating to other conjoining units. Any of the other identifiable
units that a system interacts with form part of that systems conjoining interface. Since interaction
generates a common interface of resource exchange, acquisition or export. The assumption of
multi-interaction common interfaces is the norm of unit operation in any organisation. It is in that same
vein that identification of these interaction interfaces is conceivable as a means of tracing and
determining how external influences determine adaptive response pressure. If the need for adaptation
has an extra-unit origin then defining the requirements imposed is needed to understand how the
adaptive change therein engaged is characterised and its overall effect on the unit under consideration
within the broader organisational framework.
A fair amount of organisation adaptations are also unit emergent whether it be in terms of product
changes or group social dynamics or personnel management approaches, the results of such actions and
indeed the change resources would involve several organisational extra-units and ultimately influence
the whole organisation.
2-5b Mapping Interface Interaction Details Employing Spider Maps
At the core of the diagram is the unit making adaptive change. This nucleus structure must then have
lines radiating to resource acquisition and export designated interfacing units in the systemic whole.
The lines must attempt to focus resources on identifiable formal organisational units and further
breakdowns made as deemed relevant. This simple structure thus enables in-depth as well
straightforward delineation of all that a focus unit acquires, deems as relevant to its work activities
completion.
The primary link leading into and away from the unit under consideration to bordering units forms the
primary resource link identified as unit related to enable effective grouping. Once a unit has been
identified as relevant to a production unit seeking to trace its resources links, that primary link can then
be further separated into ancillary or sub-links if more than one core resource or core resources need be
broken into additional breakdowns to facilitate understanding. The emphasis is on effective mapping of
the group resource originations and these resources include information, which much as it is not
tangible is definitely an influential element determining unit task execution and production processes. It
is the therefore incumbent on the unit to identify its significantly adaptive change inducing information
source, which may be as obvious as specific management directive arising from changes in aspects of
the external environment or it may be an internal strategic move to expand product range, or any of
variety of reasons that will require making changes in an aspect of an organisation’s subsystem to
improve existing organisational state.
The spider maps enable a simple approach to detailing the significant influences on a unit emanating
from outside the unit. Possibly, the nature of relationship between these factors and their collective
influence on the organisation unit under consideration can be elicited as a consequence of the mapping
process. However the spider map is one simple step in unit definition of task variable influences and
their origins. These factors and their originating sources, their consequence for the unit’s task and
organisational relevance can then be further integrated in intra-unit analysis of task efficiency analysis.
These enables the formal organisational structure to be disintegrated to generate a more applied,
organic but still capable of being detailed interaction interfaces among the various units and levels of an
organisation, creating system structure relevance at the task unit level that would break down into
meaninglessness when applied to all of the organisation, but a dynamic organic structure linkage that is
important to understanding task units.
In generating the map, the researcher or manager, can interview employees, review organisational
documents or give out plain sheets for employees to generate their own spider maps, which can then be
integrated into one diagrammatic representation.
(ref: Hanf, M.B. (1971) Mapping: A technique for translating reading into thinking. Journal of Reading, 14, 225-230.)
Task Unit at the
Focus of
Adaptive Change
Primary link Ancilliary link
Primary link
Primary link
Primary link
Ancilliary link
Ancilliary link
Ancilliary link
Ancilliary link
Ancilliary link
Ancilliary link
Ancilliary link
Figure 3. A prototype spider map linked with hypothetical resource import acquired to facilitate work unit task
completion
Figure 3b.Indicates a target unit with bordering interaction units that form an interface of resource sharing, acquisition,
import or export. Any unit at the focus of analysis for resource acquisition; a number of formal organisational units can be
identified as interacting interfaces. Which units aggregating these interfaces may be contingent on any of a variety of
situational defined states. (The surface area occupied is not related to scale of influence of an interacting unit on the target
unit. If two separate units interact to generate a value system that becomes a resource import for the target unit, then for
purposes of this study, the interacting must be represented. In most cases however, such interfaces are easy to generate, for
example. Since the collective decision of the individual board members of a large organisation can be aggregated at the
Board of Directors- Unit interface).
The ability to elucidate clearly the resource imports needed by any work group to complete unit tasks,
the actual nature of imported resource combination with existing unit resources become important
where adaptation has to be 1. Traced to source of instigation especially if it is from within the
organisation. 2. How the change or adaptation intended can be effected by taking into consideration
resource import and how the change in product in being imported to other organisational systems can
have the desired impact. Change or adaptation may have unit relevance in efficiency gained through
adaptive change but resonate system wide in its transferred impact. In this sense, all adaptive change
must be conceived with the system under consideration. It is in this sense, that spider mapping becomes
effective technique to diagrammatically detail how a system’s, subsystems directly determine the
operational efficiency of the unit where the adaptive change is directly being implemented. Since
organisations often exist in not only complex settings but also dynamic ones, such breakdowns enable
appropriate analysis of the adaptive response, in terms of task resource acquisition sources and
processed product export destinations within the organisation.
3
3-1 Adaptation as a Means of Increasing Organisational
Effectiveness
An organisation's effectiveness must be defined within the unique organisational circumscriptions of
purpose as a defined social institution on the social landscape, having within itself a unique social
system, built around its primary productive functions. It must defined within the organisations purpose
as self-defined, the means available for attaining those purposes, the indicators the organisation has
evolved to indicate when it is achieving its purposes in terms of those purposes translated into goals.
The degree of goal approximation needs to ascertained at a system wide level and the breakdowns of
those goals to be realised at unit levels and as identifiable goals that aggregate to determine the overall
effectiveness of the organisation.
Progress toward any goal can be measured and that measure has usually been defined as efficiency.
Efficiency is optimum resource employment in relation to any specific organisation task. Choosing the
right priorities among goals ensuring that the ultimate functions of the organisation are met under the
most desirable circumstances of both labour and resource employment is a more complex process that
approximates the concept of organisational effectiveness.
Given that organisations are aggregations of multiple units achieving a variety of functions in a social
system that generates its own conflicts and cross interests of participating constituents, it is only normal
to conceive measures of how that organisational system is performing on more than one level in
attaining fused functional goals independently, collectively and collaboratively attained from an open
system perspective that gives adequate consideration to the unpredictability of the external
environment, the organisation’s agile capability to react to change, anticipate changes from within and
without and adapt to maintain an even keel and create a basis for self-sustenance and growth as a
viable social system evolved around collective productivity.
3-2 Determining the Effectiveness Value of an Adaptive Change
An organisation's effectiveness is a measured, attained, outcome state of an organisation compared
against a preferred state of possible attainment of the organisation as a system given the cogent factors
operable in determining the existing state and the possibilities of attainment given the organisation's
existing state. A fairly significant amount of this measure is highly subjective, occurring in system
states that hardly make themselves amenable to objective evaluation while aspects such as amount of
goods produced can be objectively assessed, while bottom line measures such as profits are indicatively
monetary. This measured organisational state of attainment given the totality of multiple system
constituents interacting with externally resourced inputs internally processed does generate a
measurable state of comparative value, which determine the state of effectiveness of an organisation.
It is to be noted that an organisation's effectiveness no matter how indicatively measured is a long term
concept evolved involving the organisation’s resource use, including tangible and intangible
management activities that have far reaching organisational effect and human administrative processes
difficult to measure as figure value but that ultimately enable long term organisational survival and
growth. Though aggregate indicators of organisational activities such as total production output and
profits may be considered as helpful static measures, these measures are only partial indicators of a
more dynamic construct.
Schein (1980) concludes that a system's level criterion of organisational effectiveness must be a
multiple level criterion involving adaptability, sense of identity, capacity to test reality and internal
integration. He further asserts that viewed from this system's perspective conception, the effectiveness
of an organisation is conceivable from a variety of possible conceptualisations, however in defining an
organisation as an open system interacting with a variety of environments, having to cope with those
environments employing a variety of internal resource combinations must necessarily feature in any of
these conceivable concepts. He further clarifies this notion by indicating that taking the organisation as
a total system, organisational effectiveness could be grappled with by seeking to find answers to the
questions: how does the organisation cope with its environments? How does it obtain information and
process it validly? What mechanisms exist for translating information, particularly about alterations in
the environment into changed operations? Are the internal operations flexible enough?
The value of any adaptive change must be inferred in terms of how it has enabled the organisation to
improve its effectiveness as a viable entity.
3-2 Capacity to Cope with Need for Adaptive Change
One question, management in all organisations have to face all the time is whether an organisation has
the resource capacity to cope with needed changes. How can the organisations capacity to cope be
improved?
Management action in response to this question revolves around two action processes, these are 1)
Micro-processing management and 2) Macro process management responses. In the former,
management is involved in detailing out the action response and managing its implementation. In the
latter, management defines the broad framework, within which units define functional relevance in
deciding on the details of generating the appropriate coping strategies and solutions to emergent change
needs, which are then approved by management pre or post implementation.
Micro processing management is preferable in smaller organisations, in large organisations, and in
organisations that have adopted organisational structure formats that have transferred significant
decision making on task related issues to task implementation sources, management's actions are
framed within the macro management principle, where broad action frameworks are defined and
decision making in fast track multiple determined situations favour task units to generate effective
responses to deal with emergent problems with ease of access to secure higher management support in
terms of seeking approval or securing resources to facilitate change implementation.
However, these are extremities on degrees of enabled decision-making as management deems
appropriate for enabling effective organisational states and are not per se static. Problems within scope
of subsystem capability to resolve are best solved at that level; deviations from the norm and unusual
circumstances might require expert solution or support which may not be within unit task capacity to
enable in which case the problem decision is transferred to a higher level. This leads to the notion of
problem norms, in adaptive change situation, expected problems are often configured within an
expected response set, unusual problems related to a need for change require operating outside the box
of normal solution generation and may require innovative responses to a need for 'deviation from the
norm'.
Adaptive change that leads to sub-system redefinition at a fundamental level in terms of product
processing methods or re-arrangements of existing groups inevitable have implied in them a period of
normalisation that may influence the true outcome of the adaptive change action. Workplace norms to
some extent aggregate around the behavioural norms arising out of task organisation and changes in
these task organisation format as a result of adaptive change actions must be taken into account in short
term evaluation of the success or otherwise of significant adaptive change, especially at the task unit
level.
Adaptation is a response to a need for change identified. It is in that sense an anticipated need to change
an aspect of the existing state based on information filtered from within or without the organisation. It
is a carefully considered response of alternatives deliberated to yield a unit task response to introduce
any of degrees of variation to an organisation's products, operational processes, the technological
processes in facilitating the production process, or a change in response orientation to an aspect of the
organisation's environment. As to what the actual action process therein engaged is and to what extent
the adaptive response reorients the existing to variations of departure in any of a variety of dimensions
from an existing state is mediated by the demands of the situation under consideration. What is certain
however is that every adaptation effort is a coordinated effort to an imminent problem or toward an
anticipated improvement in existing operational state in any organisational sub-system or task unit
thereof.
While alternative solutions exist for just about any problem or imminent problems in the workplace,
Decision-making requires elimination of alternate courses of action for choice of appropriate response
to match the best combination of resources and knowledge state.
Product change adaptation hinges on technological capability on the one hand and resource available
for importing the needed resources to enable the adaptive change in the product. The degree of
adaptation needed more than anything determines the resource investments required and the capability
of the organisation to carry out that adaptation.
Coping is akin to containing an impending problem situation through implementation of a more
adequate operational response set than presently exists.
An adaptive response is a response tailored to the peculiar needs of a situational demand from the
unique interpretational viewpoint of organisation set against the perceived response need. Such
responses are tailored to solve specific needs and yield certain results. Successfully carried through,
these adaptive response become integrated into the normal organisational operational response set.
Adaptation is a grafting-in process that initially superimposes a new form in place of an existing
operational process with the calculated intention of improving an aspect of the organisation which.
Initial departure from the existing synchrony evolved over time will have to be taken cognisance of and
problems expected and unexpected must be resolved as new processes find effective integration into
prior states.
3-4 Mode of Determining Adaptive Change Action
Interacting variables of situational determinacy create a congealed state within which the need for
adaptive change response is interpretatively defined. Once a problem has been identified as requiring
operational adjustment solution, the solution thus derived requires interactivity beyond the task unit of
problem identification and implementation. Since systems are interrelated in dependency relationship
networks, the resource acquisition link for task implementation and new task implementation in most
organisational instances can only come from management approval. Thus any new adaptation requires
a multifaceted solution approach.
Since the adaptive response emerges from a fluid interactive state of dynamic production, it requires
that means for breaking down the fluid state for analytical assessment be enabled (as suggested in this
presentation as through spider web mapping technique considered within wax structure modelling of
organisational dependency interactive networks.)
Definite proposals for actual implementation may come, mostly, from within the task unit, from
external units or by management suggestions for specified changes or from some combination of all
these interaction at a common solution generating interface
An organisation in anticipatory adaptive mode has sensing mechanisms that enable it to interpret and
integrate its operational procedures, anticipations of forces developing that will require it to make
changes within some aspects of its productive activities to enable it cope more effectively with its
environmental pressures and maintain internal states at levels that enable the most value to the
organisation as a system collective.
In both the state of response to defined problem state and anticipatory response mode of adaptive
coping, organisations, as evolving systems in dynamic integrated dependency systems must be able to
evolve as part of their overall survival strategy to emerging situation through system engendered
flexibilities. These flexibilities are resources and predisposed knowledge states, enabled as resources to
enable the organisation resolve emergent needs for resource investment above the normal operational
costs to enhance the system state to enable improved organisational states.
Even where an organisation has created adequate resources to contend with unexpected materialization
of a need for change in an aspect of the environment, such momentary adaptive needs require response
sets that call for a reaction beyond the normal operational activities and may demand striking for
adaptable forms from beyond the blue. Where a response generated in a subsystem of the organisational
system might require innovative idea generation form.
A pending problem state with no immediate response available for implementation consideration erodes
overall organisation effectiveness and consequently the robustness of the organisation to deal with that
need and other emergent needs for change.
Figure 5 Solution set focusing in adaptive response selection The decisions choices that any adaptive response action
generates can be grouped descriptively into whether response choices available are 1) Unlimited, 2) limited by specific
restrictions or problem defined solution possibilities 3) restricted to a single response
Unlimited - The choice of adaptive responses are literally only limited by the ability of the decision
making body under consideration to evolve the appropriate responses to the adaptive need.
Limited - The response implementation is limited by any of a variety of factors such as knowledge level
developed in relation to the adaptive situation under consideration, technological barriers to choice of
action responses, leadership courage to engage in untested operational formats, legal and regulatory
restrictions and controls, availability of expert knowledge to derive fitting responses etc.
Restricted - The problem defines the possible solutions and within existing attained knowledge state
such responses vary around a fixed response which must be unconditional implemented.
Adaptation is built on the ability to first and foremost detect the need for a deviation from an existing
state; the existence of the capacity to facilitate the detection of this need is conditional to making
expressive that need for adaptation.
Whether or not an organisation has the ability to make obvious the need for change and consequently
make that change through adaptive response is also an issue of management efficiency and resources
devoted to monitoring sources both internal and external likely to instigate adaptive change need and
having the management resources that analytical integrate diverse information and aggregate them at a
decisional level for management action.
In regards to the above two assumptions two questions can be posed which are: -
1) Why are some obvious needs for adaptive change overlooked?
2) And why are certain needs for adaptive even when detected poorly resolved, either through
inadequate implementation or implementation actions that bring to fore the phrase, “too little too late”?
Figure 6 The Broad Action Process Framework Within Which Need for Adaptive Change is Recognised, Executed and
Verified.
The adaptive process breakdown as indicated in figure 5, can be framed within a definite time sequence
or be operationally discerned through process analysis and presented as categorical sequences in a
diffuse dynamic activity stream of organisational activity with clearly specified origins and assumptions
of end effects.
Adaptation can be tightly focused on resolving a particular problem in a particular sub-system unit or it
can be a response occurring at a sub-system level of the organisational system, it could also be an
intended multi-level coordinated effort to integrate changes at various levels across more than one
organisational sub-system to enable short term organisational viability and long term organisational
survival, or it could be in adjustments facilitated at various levels within separate task units in same or
different sub systems to ensure effective adaptation implementation at one unit through integration
across interrelated units, wherever the need for change is detected and implemented, the intent
obviously is to improve overall organisational state.
Whatever the degree of complexity implied in any adaptive change effort or the levels of organisation
involved, or number of units through which the change need be coordinated and integrated to ensure
successful implementation, adaptation implies that an organisation in some of its constituent units is
required by exigent circumstances to seek for new implementation forms beyond the daily activity sets
that occasions that unit of the organisation. This may require minor or drastic changes in routines
evolved though practice in the unit under consideration.
The assumption under which adaptation is engaged in is that, as an action response set, it is value
additive action response with overall organisational positive end benefits. It does not however
necessarily follow that every adaptive response activity is an addition to an existing state, some
adaptations are the introduction of hitherto non-existent technology or practice form, but altogether, are
expected to have an additive effect. It does not also follow that all adaptive changes will necessarily be
successful and in consequence enhance the organisational state from a comparative pre-adaptation
implementation level.
However not all Organisations are capable of similar agility in effective interpretation of their
environments and internal state to identify potential problems in formation, identifying the appropriate
knowledge framework within which action response can be configured and engage the necessary
response action to make the necessary changes to offset those problems or make the necessary
adjustments in operational procedures to offset the problem requiring an adaptive response action.
What is certain however is that organisations that are strategically poised to identify problem areas are
more apt to respond more adequately than those less inclined to invest resources in effective
environmental monitoring with an intention to make adaptations where the need is identified or
interpreted.
Figure 6b. Adaptive change is consequent on a detected need for change in response the external environment
or the internal organisation state or some combination thereof.
The characteristics of the environment from which pressure for change emerges for adaptive response,
the perceived degree of threat to organisational effectiveness in the perceived need for change, the
resources available for the organisation to carry out the needed change will all combine to detect the
quality of response activated to cope with the perceived threat to organisational sustainability.
What are some of the forces from the external environment that could pressure for an un-negotiable
adaptive response from the organisation?
i) Rapid developments in the economic environment that impact the resource acquisition ability of the
organisation, which economic pressures emerge from the general environment of the organisation
ii) Labour agitation
iii) Technological change leading to lowered production costs in competing Organisations
iv) Rapid market erosion
v) Mechanical failures in existing machine
Adaptation is internally focused with an intent to make changes that enable the unit of the sub-system
that is implementing the adaptive change to maintain or improve upon its viability by making internal
state adjustments either in response to external detected pressures for these adjustments or internal
focused improvement efforts. Externally pressured change is incidental on adaptive change as an
organisational system stabilisation effort since such changes are inevitably unavoidable, whereas
internal motivated change may be strategically oriented towards improvement beyond an existing state
of the organisation without it necessary being unconditional.
3-4 Hard – Soft Interfaces Interacting to Determine Adaptive
Change
Within Organisations, the need for adaptive change might be in response to a need to effect change at
the human element constituency composition within the organisational system in response to
technological innovations, leading to the need to upgrade employee knowledge base, reorganise work
groups or it may be a need to update existing technology. Rapid technological change has its own
consequences in terms of adaptive capacities engendered in the workforce through appropriate
knowledge transfer to enable effective performance on newer technology.
Adaptation in Organisations may require adjustments at interfaces where a change in technology may
lead to changes in operational groups and work performance orientations leading to variations from
existing work group compositions or and task arrangements. On the other hand adjustments made at the
insistence of trade union regulations may lead to changes in management employee management
strategies. While changes in management-employee orientation to enhance information transfer and
collective decision making may lead to changes in human constituent primary interaction framework
with system wide consequences with little or no deliberate changes in existing technology or machinery
employed in the production process. These interfaces defining adaptive change can be represented as a
simple interface depiction between (human) soft and (machinery/technology) hard, aggregations of four
interaction possibilities within which adaptive change can be configured.
Figure 7 The various combinations of human - technology interfaces mediating adaptive change.
Soft - Soft adaptive change interface is change effected at primarily human - human interfaces such as
management - production workers de-layering. Common platform construction for idea exchange as
occurs in workers' durbars etc. Production employees and their trade union representatives negotiating
the collective bargaining Agreement at trade unions – management interface that result in significant
changes in management practices, operations, salaries etc.
The hard face of the organisation is its technological equipments, machinery and other task utility
equipments, which are calibrated to predictable output. Hard faces must necessarily interact with soft
face human components of the organisation, which human components are less predictable, to yield
operational ends.
Hard - hard adaptive change interfaces occur where as technology changes, internal machinery are
replaced to reflect the adaptive change induced through the technology change; where product quality
improvement may require adaptive adjustment through machinery upgrading; it may also be
conjectured where effective integration through technological adaptation in one organisational unit leads
to unintended upgrades to create system technology balance to enable efficiency in production
processes.
Hard - soft / soft - hard adaptive change interfaces are configurable where technological change leads
to re-arrangements at the human machine interface and the reformation of work groups as a
consequence.
The element of flexible fluctuation facilitated at the (soft-soft/hard-soft) human -technology interfaces,
effectively managed, may result in degrees of adjustment to maintain peak average performance. Peak
average performance can be interpreted as the desired level aspired to in terms of attained productivity
daily from each task unit.
3-4b Streamlining Hard-Soft Interaction To Yield System Supportive Adaptation
The degree of flexibility permitted by an organisation to its sub-systems to effect adaptive change will
to a reasonable extent be defined by three factors:
1. Top Management acceptance of identified need for adaptive change at some sub-system unit of the
organisation and the willingness to release the resources required to invest in implementing the adaptive
change.
2. Availability of surplus resources
3. Overall organisational culture that permits flexibility through encouraging creative employee input at
all levels, to enable ease of departure from existing states of predetermined formats for task execution
to adapt to employ new approaches.
Ingrid Bonn's article "Staying on Top" which enumerates and elaborates the characteristics of long term
organisational survival examines four broad categories of variables of that might affect longevity
1. Environmental variables
2. Organisational variables
3. Company strategies, and
4. Ownership characteristics
These variables were derived from empirical studies that studied the relationship between various
variables that influence organisational performance.
Organisations that coordinate through effective management to develop the best fit in the relationship
and interdependency between these variables in operational process manifestation, and enable unit
integration into the various sub-system units and sub-system integration to define organisational
effectiveness state are most likely to yield the best performance, since resources are least likely to be
diffracted but highly tuned through collaborative effort at all interaction interfaces where task
implementation and decision making aggregate to yield mutually supportive implementation processes,
where task processes are designed through collective input of interested parties to generate smooth with
the least flaws in pursuit of collective interests common goals, with individual employee ends being
taken into consideration as a complementary condition for successful organisational pursuit and
realisation of primary organisational interests and goals.
Krell (2000) emphasis that " individuals will tend to allow a group to make decisions that they would not make as
individuals alone . . . thus to effect change in an organisation, we must direct simultaneous, diverse effort toward the social
system, culture and each individual member of every group at or about the same time, frequently this entails
environmental, technical and profound structural changes". Experience, as well as group and social
psychological theory, have shown that In other words in making adaptive change, changes in
management-employee relationship in terms of the participative engagement of management and
employee in the adaptive change might yield mutual benefits.
Organisations as systems, find definitive expressions at nodes, where the intricate balancing of
supportive, multi-variable dependency structured formal and informal roles evolved through
planned-practice to enable organisation system sustenance through orchestrated infusion of imported
resources to be operated upon to derive contrived internal states which aggregate at nodal points in the
complex chain of dependency relationship of human (soft-soft) and technology (hard-soft) and
interaction to yield outputs, the export of which to an organisation's external environment complete the
open system cyclical interplay of resource acquisition from the external environment - processing in the
organisation - selling or delivery to consumers - purchasing of resources with the earnings to begin the
cycle. In manufacturing Organisations, the cycle is a perfect model in operation. The nodes at which the
internal process of soft-hard interaction aggregate are often the task units or work groups which
constitute an Organisations sub-system within which actual production or operations are realised.
Adaptation is a recourse to correctly perceived threat to the intricate balance attained in the
combination of material, humans and machines at any node in the complex organisational network,
around which organisational equilibrium, regularly adjusted in reaction to internally determined and
externally influenced states of efficiency, feasible organisational existence accrues. One of the
fundamental assumptions of wax structuring is that these nodes of activity defined interactivity congeal
and dissolve to define unique activity schemes and that certain organisational actions such as
adaptation can only be understood by defining construct reality from these nodes or nexuses of action
definition.
Ineffective integration of multiple purposes in any organisational task setting, such that primary
purposes conceived from an organisational interest perspective, for example interests conceived in
terms of increasing production from a purely technical point of view, profit increment, are poorly
integrated into support, secondary purposes of employee comfort, internal environment material
provisions, job security, social need considerations of work groups, can lead to schism between
management and employees, diffracting focus from a mutually engaged task orientation to sublime
subversive employee undermining of "the organisation" as a result of poor management practices. Such
strains, in the long run impose unnecessary imbalance in organisation resources at both soft-soft, and
soft-hard interfaces, as ineffective divergences from primary task activities carried out in all supportive
mutually configured organisational management designations are discordantly disaggregated as
secondary social needs and primary task goals overemphasised as prime considerations stray further
from the former and cause work group energy diffusion in the self-interest pursuit of seeking through
informal self-redesign of work and formal protest to bring these two states to be complementary.
Management in this case must at all times seek to create organisational states where employees see
themselves as mutually engaged in “running the organisation” and part owners of their organisation.
(Definition - 1. diffract - to split along primary lines of dissonance causing energy distribution to split variables that ought
to co-operate to yield favourable end states and thus reducing end effect on one and collective object constituency.
2. Variable - representing an unspecified member of a class of entities.)
Adaptive change is local focused change, it is a targeted action aimed at resolving a real or presumed
problem within a sub-system or its unit thereof with organisational effects, since such actions are
intended to improve the operational state whether through technological related adjustments or
machinery upgrades or re-tooling as the case may be.
Whatever, the problem assumed, the origin of the problem need be specified and change facilitated
within that sector of the organisation, where change is necessitated to obviate the presumed adverse
consequences were such a problem not to be resolved through adaptive change implementation.
Problem solution need to be targeted and resolved through unit participation, given that knowledge
infusion from management or expert knowledge sources must be implemented within a not so obvious
social milieu where task and non-task related social relevancies interact to determine the explicit task
outcome. This is simply because while organisation task variables are preferably conceived from
relevant aggregations towards direct system relevance, where system relevance is often configured in
the approximation of some productivity target, employees at task unit conception of organisation
relevance is a more inclusive variable combination of non-task related considerations and organisational
management approaches irrespective of how conceived are, yield better results when integrated with
employee inputs before decision implementation at points of execution.
Open system planning gives credence to the assumption that idea generation is universal on the one
hand and that involved engagement rather than imposed requirements are the best approach in the
flexible work setting to maximise efficiency.
Assuming that the work setting is a given, given that adaptive change can only occur in an already
existing work unit in an organisation (or one that has been created from an existing sub system work
group to meet the adaptive change implementation, giving further credence to the earlier asserted “
pseudo snow-ball effect” of local change having wider organisational ramifications), then it is only
normal to assume that employees will through interaction with this given setting mould it to
accommodate their socio-psychological needs. Technology and organisational management attempt to
meet employees normal social needs through design and open system planning respectively, however
such social need must be balanced with organisational interests taking into consideration the limitations
of attained technology, the resources available to the organisation and the socio-psychological needs of
employees.
The question thus that needs to be posed is, what degree of compromise between any combination of
two or more organisational factors within existing means of execution of the organisation in the light of
existing resources can be organised to yield mutually complementary ends across diverse organisational
interests?
The work group in a production unit is of primary importance, since adaptive change implementation
occurs within some defined work group, how that work group socio-psychologically breaks down and
remoulds itself to adapt itself to the demands of the adaptive change is relevant to the long term impact
of the change effort. Organisational psychology research in the area of work groups, indicate the
important role of informal group opinions and their crucial role as sublime influences that not only
prop-up formal groups but serve as knowledgeable assessors of the quality of management as applied
to the formal work groups. Adaptive change efforts need to employ a process of mutual engagement of
all concerned to discuss the decision aspect of the nature of actual adaptation to employ to ensure that
whatever change is implemented is not as indicated above rejected informally as not work group
amiable.
Figure 7a Connexion influence on adaptive change in one task unit.
Figure 7b. The connexion determinant effect in actual adaptive change implemented.
In this hypothetical depiction the Task Unit receives and sends resources or information to the units labelled A, B, C, D,
and E. These units may pro-actively have to ascertain to what extent Task Unit where adaptive change is being
implemented will affect their interaction with Task Unit and make adjustments accordingly, others will have to make
process adjustments, the degree of significance will depend on the nature of exchange relationship between the target unit
under consideration, here referred to as "Task Unit", and the interacting unit. To determine the exact nature of the resource
dependency interaction, a spider web map can be developed by the Task Unit.
Adaptive action choice decision is more often than not a more comprehensive consideration that extends
beyond the locus of adaptive change implementation. Indeed, as is often the case, management analysis
of external environments may lead to decision to make drastic adjustments at production or in
marketing strategy, in other instances production may feel the need to change machinery or acquire
additional machinery or re-tool, which need is then passed on to management for consideration. Thus,
the implementation locus is more or less an aggregation of decision-making, which then serves as a
departure point for further analysis based on the outcomes of the implemented change.
The exact nature of how this inter unit connexion of inter unit dependency variable re alignment takes
place is liable to be a planned effort or a less determinate elimination of irrelevance by default of
redundancy as change processes in operational evolution reject redundancy by default or in formerly
receptive organisational units or more precisely, in the task unit at the focus of adaptive change
dependency interaction relevance is redefined and transferred to other units. It is the latter activity set in
relation to the adaptive change that is worrisome since such non-strategic consideration may through
some situational defect take precedence over formal processes affecting the quality of implementation
decision outcome.
In seeking for highest quality possible outcome for decision implementation, the non formal influences,
such as information import and export through informal means need to be seen as primary
considerations to be structured into the decision making process by creating a collaborative framework
where openness creates awareness, for early input of divergent views before implementation has
attained the stage where changing the adaptive change will be far too costly than if early awareness had
enabled a means for divergent input across the stream of all concerned interests.
The larger the organisation, the likelihood is that the more complex adaptation will be. In such
complex, multi-unit constituted organisations, adaptive change in one unit with close interaction and
carry over effects through unit interaction at any of numerous task situation defining interaction
interfaces with others units must through effective organisation management processes export change
awareness across the organisational stream, exporting the change efforts positive values and making
efforts to provide sufficient information and adequate support to facilitate the adjustments needed to
integrate benefits accruing from the adaptive change at one level through supportive buoying across the
organisation to yield complementary ends of mutual beneficial ends for the systemic whole.
This consideration brings to the fore the question of seeking to define what inevitable occurrences can
detract an otherwise well planned adaptive change response from yielding desired end benefits?
To tackle this issue, there is the need of dividing adaptive response change into two main spheres of
activities.
1. The first is Integrated Adaptive Change Response where problem identification, more often task
based need for change discernment, is integrated into operational level decision making, and changes
suspected as necessary are forwarded to management for consideration and resource provision.
2. The second is Adaptive Change as a management level strategic response to external environment
indications. These mainly arise from total system analysis, which is an ongoing management activity.
This total system analysis may give management cause for directing adaptive change at some level of
operational activities to improve and yield added value to the organisation.
The need for differing between these two sources of need for adaptive change is simply for the reason
that in Organisations where the latter predominate, the associated inflexibility of uni-directional
decision making creates problems related to effective adaptation that are totally irrelevant where the
operational source of change implementation is involved in problem identification and decision related
to the nuances of effective implementation.
The Organisation that successfully adapts along several fronts progressively must create an internal
environment of: -
1. Effective sensing of environmental triggers of selective change through multiple means, more
importantly this means informational resource must be converted into internal resource at some point of
convergence for system use and benefit.
2. Where interface interaction, whether mediated through role occupants or product exchange or
acquisition process, inconsequential on human mediators, be coerced through effective management
strategies to generate overlap synergies while minimising the inevitable conflicts that occasion all
human interfaces (soft-soft).
(Definition: synergy - The working together of two things to produce an effect greater than the sum of their individual
effects).
3. In other words successful adaptation is defined within an existing culture of co-operation across task
units and where such is lacking the opportunity offered by change should be employed in reducing
conflict and enable the collective interest of system sustenance through co-operation supersede
parochial idiosyncrasies of opposing blocs, collectively working to undermine organisational
effectiveness, taken from a wider and longer term perspective.
4. Which leads to the need for management to define adaptive change relevance at employee level,
where shared awareness permeates the collective of the strategic, obvious and less obvious benefits of
the adaptive change under implementation consideration. On the other hand unit emergent need for
change will have to be reviewed by management with a more objective, and organisational benefit of
such change as the focus within change is considered and implemented.
(definition: Strategy: An elaborate and systematic plan of action).
A need for for
change at some
organisational is
diagnosed
The nature of
specific change
action to be
implemented is
determined
System resources
to implement the
change are
resourced
The impact of
change is
configured and
system units
involved in exchange
dependency relation
witht he unit where
change is to take
place are sensetised.
Adaptive change
is implemented
and its effect and
consequences
evaluated over
stabilisation
period.
Figure 7c. The broad process in problem identification to change implementation
3-7 Industry Technological Change and Local Adaptive Response
Since organisations in any industry are often competing for consumers in similar markets, the
competitive pressure makes any organisation sensitive to changes in competitor’s products, either
directly through eroding market base or indirectly through implied lag in competitiveness.
Technological changes in manufacturing processes also lead to lowered costs of production and give an
added advantage to early adopters of a new technology.
Products have a life cycle which is indicated in terms of the products emergence as an manufactured
item, the rate of product output growth, which is the increasing output as a result of rising consumer
needs, this product life cycle is thus indicated as a graph of product sales indicated as units sold against
price, under normal circumstances this should indicate a curve of rising sales from product introduction
to a peak, which levels and eventually declines as the product loses its market appeal. It has been
observed that this cycle has been shortening through the decades. In 1920, the length of the average life
cycle of a new product was 25 years. In the 1970 the length of the average product life cycle had
decreased to two years (Scheuing, 1974). Indications are that these product life cycles will be ever
shorter as new technologies and creativity outburst among an ever more educated population drives
innovation ever faster.
Rapid technological change leads to rapid product introduction and increases pressure on organisations
to make technological adaptations to keep up with "the pack" of similar product manufacturers. Since
technological change transforms the nature of the market place by changing the relative cost, features
and availability of products, an organisation is under competitive pressure to either adapt to adopt new
technology or lose the race for organisational sustainability in the consumers market.
3-8 The Cost Element Of Adaptive Change
Adaptation may involve resource allocation that is beyond slack resource utilisation and the
redistribution of operational resources to accommodate the need for adaptive change at one unit of the
organisation. This implies that adaptation may require employing the reserved resources of an
organisation and where it does not suffice the shifting of resources from existing spheres through
resource redistribution to enable supportive supplementation of the area within the organisation where
investable resource lack may potentially threaten de-railing of the adaptive change effort.
The need for change to improve existing states within some organisational subsystem or task unit may
very well be undermined by invest able resource limitations or non-availability, leading in the long run
to spiralling failures as inability to improve system state at one level transfers less than adequate
performance quality downstream in the operational activities sets.
The cost element of adaptive change has by implication a variety of immediate and remote implications
for the Organisation of concern.
In the first place where adaptation requires input resources that must be within means of organisational
acquisition, either by drawing from surplus resources or shifting existing resources from areas of low
priority to support adaptive change in the unit in need of immediate change implementation. A third
source will be acquisition from non-organisational sources, such as through bank loans or other
borrowers.
Where adaptive resource acquisition means "poaching" from less burdened or lower priority units to
units under threat from less than adequate performance due to lack or the need of resources to
implement needed change, then immediate consequences are actual tightening in existing resource levels
including slack resource depletion to supplement the obvious lack in the unit implementing adaptive
change.
The units from which resources are shifted are in the interim forced to change operational form to
accommodate resource shrinkage. (While in the medium term, baring the total collapse of the units from
which resources have been shifted, slack resources generated as a consequence of the successful
adaptation may be shifted back to depleted units, in the short term such units have to contend with less
than usual resources to continue to operate).
It is not to be forgotten that normally organisational resources are limited and allocated according to
budgetary projections to units and thus any resource shift due to immediate adaptive need impositions
has financial stability repercussions for the Organisation and its short-term operation.
Conclusion
Adaptive change normally begins when certain changes in the external and or internal environment are
interpreted as potentially threatening to short or long term organisational sustenance. Thus an
organisation may sense that employee morale is too low, or that several departments are competing
destructively to undermine organisational sustenance or that technological adaptations in competing
organisations has given competitors a market edge, or that technology needs to be improved in the
organisations to maximise resource use, or that aspects of management attitudes and approaches are
failing to elicit expected employee response. Once the organisation perceives some need presaging a
need for change or bearing upon creating a problem state for the organisation if left unattended, it must
then digest this information at its information analytical centres and courses of action in response to the
situation in need of attention.
The ability to determine how, what, when and where there is a departure from an assumption of normal
state of the Organisation and consequently the need to align an existing production through upward
adjustment of an organisation through sub-system change lies at the root of successful adaptation.
Adaptive change is best conceived as anticipated, pro-active or reactive change implemented to resolve
"local" organisational need for adjustment with potential system wide end effect.
Critical consideration must be given to spread over effects of subsystem change. These diffusion effects
of change must be ascertained in terms of effect on other system units as determined in actual influence
on achieving internal task execution. This is mainly due to the assumption that adaptive change is
practically a hands-on response implemented to address what is in most instances a less than total
organisational change. Resistance is lowered where those directly engaged in implementing the change
are made to appreciate its relevance well before the implementation. Organisational constituents not so
willing to accept adaptive change in organisational processes must be quickly identified and gently
made to flexibly respond positively to changes rather than being allowed to maintain their rigid
attitudes of intolerance to changes in the status quo. Resistance to change is normal and must be
expected and preparations made as to how to handle when it emerges as an obvious detraction to
effective change implementation.
The presentation has presented a way to model task unit dependent change process of a limited kind; the
adaptive change. It is an untested model that needs to be verified as to its veracity as worthy tool for the
student of organisational change to facilitate this field testing, a research format is detailed in the
appendix section.
APPENDICES
Appendix 1
Generating wax structured spider web maps
A. The unit at stake of the analysis is individually determined and each person as the question -
1. What are your job functions?
2. What do you need to perform this/these job/s ?
3. What resources other than the installed machinery and or technology do you need to perform your
work?
4. Where and how are these resources acquired? (The employee is respectfully requested to indicate
both official and non-official resources without which the task is not accomplished!).
5. On the sheet of paper given you looking at the example provided link your resources to other
organisational units and external environment components?
(Please answer by ticking either yes or no; to the question posed
- I don't have any idea where the task inputs comes from, I only do my job)
yes ( )
no ( )
B. The research analyst would have had prior discussion or interview with the manger and supervisor responsible for the
organisational unit under consideration and would have a fair idea of how resource acquisition and internal production
processes occur and is able to indicate this diagrammatically against which he/she would make confirmatory comparisons
and unofficial information and support resource infusion assessment from task unit wax model, spider web diagrams.
Appendix 1b
Study Questions
1. What aspects of the external environment does the organisation pay attention to?
1b. How do these environments influence the organisation outcome state?
0?Directly?
1?Indirectly?
2. How do (the) organisations respond to an identified need to adapt any aspect of the
organisation to cope with changing internal and external states?
3. With regards to a detected need, which aspect of the organisation system monitors, collects and
analysis information related to an external inducement to change?
4. How are these information channelled to the appropriate decision-making and from decision
making to implementation stations?
5. On what basis are particular developments in the external environment interpreted as adaptive
change pressures? - Relate to actual examples?
6. How does any particular change occur within the formal organisational structural framework,
at what zones does the formal structures disassemble to mould itself adaptively to effectively
integrate decision making and implementation in response to quick internal response needs?
7. How does the formal organisation interpret this fluid structural dynamism?
8. How responsive are decision making bodies in the organisation prepared to regroup
information interaction interface at problem source and provide supportive basis for functional
efficiency at these “need determined interaction interfaces”?
9. How and in what ways does an adaptive response at one point affect the whole organisation?
10. How are resources located and allocated for adaptive responses?
11. Why the need for adaptive change?
12. Where does the pressure for change arrive, internal determined or external detected need?
13. Detail what these influences that suggest need for adaptive response at organisational level
are?
14. What gives rise to the emergence of these adaptive change pressure emergences?
15. What would be the consequences for the organisation if it decides not to invest resources in the
detected need to which adaptive response is required?
Appendix 2 (residual oversight knowledge required to grasp some of the
concepts mentioned in the body of the essay)
Types of Organisational Goals
Perrow (1970), has elaborated on five types of goals operative at various levels and in relation to
various needs and activity aspirations of the organisation.
1. Societal goals: These goals are intended to project a certain image to the society and to work within
this aspirations to maintain that social presentation, examples of such goals are the organisation exists
to produce certain goods and services, to respect the industrial regulations and the general laws of the
society, to generate and maintain cultural values.
2. Output goals: This goal is intended at meeting the needs of a certain element of the external
environment; the consumers and target groups to which an Organisations products are aimed. Examples
of these goals would be the creation of consumer products, business services, health care, educational
programs and so on, socio technical system theorists refer to this as the "primary task" or "core
mission" of the organisation.
3. System goals: These are goals related to maintaining an expected state of organisational system state
of existence. Examples of these goals would be the goals of growth, efficiency, obtaining market share,
attaining certain profit levels, being a certain kind of Organisation in terms of style or climate, being a
leader in the industry and so on. These kinds of goal uniquely identify an organisation and must be
mixed up with output goals, if in attempting to maintain a certain style, an Organisation loses sight of
its output goals, it may threaten its own survival.
4. Product characteristics goal: These are goals related to the actual product quality, quantity, variety,
styling, availability, uniqueness, innovativeness or whatever. In one sense these goals are more specific
derivatives of the output and system goals since certain combinations of what the Organisation is
basically creating and its style will dictate product characteristics.
5. Derived goals: An organisation's leadership do accumulate power and resources in the course of
primary goal fulfilments, these resources and power it may decide to employ in certain ways. For
example an organisation may use its power and wealth for certain political goals, to build educational
institutions or to support the arts or local educational institutions. The derivative goal inasmuch as it
derives its accumulated resources and power base from the pursuit and fulfilment of other
organisational goals, the derivative goals are independent of the goals the pursuit of which generated
the resources and power. (Adapted from Schein 1980).
Schein (1980) further admonishes that it is particularly important that when organisations engage in
strategic planning activities, that they learn to distinguish their societal and output goals - those which
ultimately justify the survival of the organisation in the total society - from the secondarily generated
system, product and derived goals. He emphasised that many of the essential components of planning
exercises should be especially geared to helping top management first to identify clearly what their
output goals are and what justifies their continued existence as an organisation before they discuss
system, product, or derived goals.
Appendix 3
How Technology Defines Organisational Forms
Whether there is any one best way to organise an organisation and in doing so what criteria to take into
consideration has been a perennial concern of students of organisations. Early work in the field of
Organisational Theory attempted to derive the general principles about such issues as the optimal
number of subordinates, but concurrent studies in the subject area have shown that effectiveness did not
necessarily correlate with the degree of adherence to these principles, thus requiring further search for
other variables to account for the relationship between form and effectiveness. One such line of
research attempted to examine the nature of task an organisation performed and the technology
employed in meeting those goals. Woodward (1965) from studies of about 100 British firms to
determine whether their organisational structures were related to three major types of technology which
she distinguished:
1. Unit and small batch technology, in which customized products are made for individual customers.
2. Large batch and mass production technology such as that found on the assembly line.
3. Process technology, which involves the transformation of raw materials through a series of
continuous (chemical) processes.
Woodward's study revealed that companies with different technologies demonstrated different
characterised patterns and that the most effective companies within each group were the ones closest to
the median for that category, suggesting that there were optimal organisational forms. For example,
with increasing technological complexity, as one moves from unit to mass to continuous-process
technology, the number of subordinates under a given executive increased, the number of levels in the
organisational hierarchy increased, the ratio of administrators, supporting staff and specialists
increased, relative labour costs decreased, and so on. A more formal, structured approach seemed best
suited to mass production technology, while a more flexible organisation seemed better suited to both
unit and process technologies.
In subsequent studies by Pugh (1973), Hickson and his colleagues (1969), and others called the Aston
Group showed that the effects of technology tended to apply only to those parts of the organisation
intimately involved with that technology - typically the production departments - and that one could not
infer organisational structures in other functional departments such as accounting and marketing, or in
the firm as a whole unless it was very small. They argued for a more contingent set of relationships,
namely, that technology will influence organisation only if organisational size and type of department
are controlled for.
In a more recent study, Mahoney and Frost (1974) focused on specific departments rather than total
organisations and used the three-part typology of technique proposed by Thompson (1967):
1. Long-linked technologies, in which there is a series of interdependent steps such as in the assembly
line or in continuous process work.
2. Mediating technologies, which the work units links otherwise independent units into a system
through the creation of standard operating procedures.
3. Intensive technologies, in which each task sequence is uniquely applied to the particular needs of a
given client based on feedback from earlier steps
Using managerial judgements as to which factors contributed most to effectiveness, Mahoney and Frost
found that in long linked technologies such as in data processing, the important factors were planning,
efficient utilisation of employee skills for task performance and tight supervisory controls. In mediating
technologies such as clerical departments in an insurance company, effectiveness was related more to
the ability to remain flexible and adaptive to the needs of the moment. In intensive technologies such as
research laboratories, managers related overall effectiveness more to effective utilisation of employees,
the building of cooperation and team spirit, the personal development of employees, and careful staffing
of projects.
Steers (1977) notes conclusively that there is no simple, consistent relationship between technology and
structure, though there and is some evidence that more complex unstable technologies are less likely to
be associated with more formal hierarchical structures.
From studies conducted on technology and organisational form to date, Perrow (1970) starting with two
characteristics of organisational tasks (basic underlying dimensions of technology):
1. The degree to which the task is routinised and has few exceptions,
2. The degree to which the task to be performed is based on analysable principles and known ways of
solving problems (versus having constantly to invent new solutions because of variations in the
problems posed)
These two dimensions enable Perrow to sort various kinds of technology into a fourfold table as shown
in Figure 11.4. In cell 1 we have what might best be characterised as the "craftsmanship" approach.
The raw material and the basic product remain essentially the same, but individual customers may want
some special feature.
In cell 2 is what Perrow refers to as "normative manufacturing" or, at the extreme, R&D types of work
which require a much more flexible organisation, organisations in these industries ideally display high
discretion at both the technical and the managerial level, high interaction, decentralisation of decision
making according to need for effective coordinating structures.
Cell 3 involves custom made products, but in areas well known for their amenability to technical and
analytical solution. Typically engineering firms that design customised equipment for manufacturing
firms and production organisations that that apply such designs to making drill presses. electric motors,
and so on. In this model, the technical level has relatively more discretion because it possesses the
problem-solving techniques needed to design and manufacture the process. Coordination is achieved
high interaction with and feedback from the customer. The organisation is flexible but also centralised
because of the known problem solving routines.
Cell 4 is the traditional routine manufacturing operation involving mass production or continuous
process operation where the technology is well understood. Thus, both of Woodward's other types, the
"large batch assembly" and the "continuous process" fall into this cell, since both share what Thompson
has termed long linked technologies and a high degree of sequential interdependency. Firms in this cell
display the greatest tendency toward the formal, centralised, bureaucratic form of organisation where
coordination is achieved primarily through the rules and plans; however, it should be noted that, at the
extremes, in continuous process technologies such as automated oil refineries, this does not hold true.
At the extremes the relationships are instead adaptive to the particular characteristics of the task
performed, so that in the oil refinery there is high formalisation but also high decentralisation down to
skilled operators who have high levels of responsibility and high discretion within a well defined set of
rules (Blauner, 1964).
Appendix Figure 1 Types of production technologies (Perrow, 1970).
The implied relevance of this appendix is to enable a clearer format for interpreting technology and
organisational form, it is summary in nature and readers are advised to refer to Schein (1980) for
deeper insight and read original research publications related to references made here and therein.
Appendix 4
Organisational Effectiveness
A system’s level criterion of organisational effectiveness is by necessity a multiple criterion involving
adaptability, sense of identity, capacity to test reality and internal integration. To the extent that
effectiveness is a multiple criterion, it would be erroneous to assume that just the establishment of a
mutually satisfactorily psychological contract with employees, or just the reduction of intergroup
competition or just leadership training or just the right organisation structure, or any of these alone
would guarantee effectiveness. Rather the system conception would suggest a different way of thinking
about the problem; viewed as a total system, how does an organisation cope with its environment? How
does it obtain information and process it validly? What mechanisms exist for translating the
information, particularly about alterations in the environment into changed operations? Are the internal
operations flexible enough to cope with changes? How can the organisations capacity to cope be
improved? (Schein, 1980)..
(Reference should be made to Harrison (1987) for detailed reading material on measuring organisational
effectiveness during organisational change.)
Appendix 5
An Adaptive Coping Cycle
That sequence of activities or processes which begins with a change in some aspect of the
organisation’s internal or external environment and ends with a more adaptive dynamic equilibrium for
dealing with the change can be thought of as the organisation’s adaptive coping cycle.
An adaptive response necessarily requires an evident or susceptible misalignment at one or several
critical nexuses of an organisation and any or its environments or between internal system states. This
misalignment, which may result in less than desirable outcome states if left unattended, requires a
reactive adjustment response to realign the organisational system at a higher level of effectiveness
through the introduction of improvement conditions tantamount on implementation of the adaptive
change, which improves existing state by introducing organisational state enhancing effects.
For purposes of analysing the cycle, one can think of five conceptually separable stages, however these
are not process-wise realised, they are conceivable as simultaneously events broken down for analytical
considerations, since organisations elements are in constant dynamic interaction with internal states
interacting at multiple levels with various external environments.
The first stage of the cycle is sensing where a change in some part of the internal or external
environment is identified or recognised through total system monitoring.
The relevant information about the change is the imported into those parts of the organisation that can
act upon it and employ that information in applied decision making in the organisation.
Decisions based on the analysed information imported are employed in designing the actual adaptive
change implementation, which aims to change production or conversion processes inside the
organisation.
Once changes have been undertaken through adaptive response, which may require internal product and
product processing, changes a new or altered product is exported in response to the interpretations
made of environmental emerging information of a need for change.
The success or failure of an adaptive change can be determined through feedback information collected
as response on the change export.
Further there is the need to determine adaptive change degree of integration internal environment.
Any change in organisations is potentially a destabilisation influence inasmuch it is a departure from a
known states of operations, stabilisation
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