Lost in Transition? Complexity in Organisational Behaviour - the Contributions of Systems Theories**

Zusammenfassung

---

This paper tries to contribute to potential development areas in Organisational Behaviour (OB) in terms of theoretical foundations and research methods by pursuing 3 goals: 1. The paper presents the basic concepts of a theory family holding promises to remedy some of the deficiencies in OB diagnosed. 2. It describes some methods used within the scope of these theoretical concepts. 3. It demonstrates the potential usefulness of these theoretical concepts and methods by applying them to empirical research in the area of managerial careers. The "common denominator" of the threefold purpose of this paper is the focus on the complexity of systems which is an integral part of many OB phenomena at all levels of analysis. Trying to be innovative in science is always linked with risks: what is innovative in one field may be yesterday's wisdom in another, the standards for evaluating the degree of innovation vary between different observers, or the innovation ultimately does not lead to new insight.

Siehe den Gesamtinhalt dieses Dokumentes

Auszug

---

Lost in Transition? Complexity in Organisational Behaviour - the Contributions of Systems Theories**

1. Introduction

Theoretical and empirical research in Organisational Behaviour (OB) has been quite successful: the discipline has its own identity despite cutting across various "traditional" scientific disciplines, for some phenomena like work motivation or group work the insight is considerable and last but not least, the topics that are the traditional focus of OB receive unbroken attention from the academic as well as the practitioners' world.

Yet a growing uneasiness about some developments or, in other parts, a lack of development starts to grow. The following elements could be seen as potential deficiency areas where new developments are needed: the current emphasis on individuals in organisations while neglecting larger social units or the organisation itself, the lack of attention to the temporal aspects, dynamics and complexity of OB phenomena in general and larger social systems in particular, and a scarcity of research methods that can be applied to dynamic systems.

While these shortcomings are well known for some time, there have been a number of attempts to make use of theories and methods that have been developed in other disciplines dealing with complex systems. Chaos theory is a good example for such attempts.

Apart from a steady interest in non-linear models in the area of economics (e.g., stock market modelling) the frequent use of chaos theory or related concepts in management literature or publications on organisational behaviour in the 1990s did not sustain. Concepts like fractal manufacturing or fractal companies (Warnecke 1993), strategic approaches at the edge of chaos (Brown/Eisenhardt 1998), organisation as flux and transformation (Morgan 1997) and others are largely metaphorical (for an overview see Stacey et al. 2000), and sometimes mostly rely on technical terms the authors use to impress the reader (Sokal/Bricmont 1998). Additionally, many concepts referring to chaos management and pretending to be directly derived from "new science" are after all just old wine in new bottles. Nonetheless, as Allan Sokal (1998) observed, many authors hold "forth at length on scientific theories about which one has, at best, an exceedingly hazy idea. The most common tactic is to use scientific (or pseudo-scientific) terminology without bothering much about what the words actually mean" (20). Furthermore, empirical research using chaos theory in the field of organisational behaviour never really existed.

This paper tries to contribute to potential development areas in OB in terms of theoretical foundations and research methods by pursuing three goals.

* First, the paper presents the basic concepts of a theory family holding promises to remedy some of the deficiencies in OB diagnosed above.

* second, it describes some methods used within the scope of these theoretical concepts.

* Third, it will demonstrate the potential usefulness of these theoretical concepts and methods by applying them to empirical research in the area of managerial careers.

The "common denominator" of the threefold purpose of this paper is the focus on the complexity of systems which is an integral part of many OB phenomena at all levels of analysis.

2. Theorising about complex systems

More than one hundred years ago the French mathematician...

Siehe den Gesamtinhalt dieses Dokumentes

---