SATM 6.2.3.2. The Early Stages of Socio-technical Systems Thinking

Socio-technical systems theory sees organizations as pursuing primary tasks that can best be realized if their social, technological, and economic dimensions are jointly optimized and if they are treated as open systems and fitted into their environment.

Of paramount importance is the idea that work groups or organizations should be regarded as interdependent socio-technical systems. They have interactive technological and social aspects, and in designing the structure of the group or organization both of these should be considered.

If the structure of the work organization is designed with only the technology in mind, then it may be disruptive of the social system and not achieve maximum efficiency. If it is designed with only the social and behavioral aspects in mind, it is unlikely to make very good use of the technology.

In designing work organizations, their social, technological, and economic elements (the subsystems recognized in socio-technical theory) should be jointly optimized. Jointly optimization means ensuring optimization of the whole, even if this requires a less than optimum state for each separate aspect.

Joint optimization is possible because there is organizational choice. It is possible within the same technological and economic constraints to operate with different forms of work organization. So, given the constrains, managers should exercise their choice over the type of work organization to adopt with the social system in mind.

An organization's primary task is the task it has to perform in order to survive.

The work organizations should be regarded as open systems. The socio-technical thinkers were very influenced by von Bertalanffy's conclusions and employed the usual open system, input-transformation-output model to understand production systems.

The workers were more satisfied if they worked in groups. Groups could tackle whole tasks, and make work more meaningful for the individual. 

The semi-autonomous work groups, are supposed to act as self-regulating and self-developing social systems, capable of of maintaining themselves in a steady state of high productivity. Control and decision making are exercised internally by the group and not externally by managers. Within the groups, great flexibility can exist with job rotation and workers being encouraged to become multi-skilled. 

This frees management for the much more important task of "boundary management." Instead of wasting time attempting to apply autocratic regulation, managers can invest their energies in relating the operating system (and the organization as a whole) to its environment; ensuring that the group doing the work in the operating system is supplied with the necessary input, and that its output is disposed of profitably on the market.

 (Jackson, Michael C. (2000) Systems Approaches to Management, Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers. P115.)