Socio-technical systems

In organizational development, socio-technical systems (or STS) is an approach to complex organizational work design that recognizes the interaction between people and technology in workplaces.

The term also refers to the interaction between society's complex infrastructures and human behaviour. In this sense, society itself, and most of its sub-structures, are complex socio-technical systems.

The term sociotechnical systems was coined in the 1960s by Eric Trist and Fred Emery, who were working as consultants at the Tavistock Institute in London.

Some topics

Major topics in social-technical systems are job design, job enrichment, job enlargement, job rotation, motivation, process improvement, satisfaction, task analysis, and self-managing teams.

Work design

Work design or job design in organizational development is the application of socio-technical systems principles and techniques to the humanization of work. The aims of work design to improved job satisfaction, to improved through-put, to improved quality and to reduced employee problems, e.g., grievances, absenteeism.

Job enrichment

Job enrichment in organizational development, human resources management, and organizational behavior, is the process of giving the employee a wider and higher level scope of responsibilitiy with increased decision making authority. This is the opposite of job enlargement, which simply would not involve greater authority. Instead, it will only have an increased number of duties. [ Richard M. Steers and Lyman W. Porte, "Motivation and Work Behavior", 1991. pages 215, 322, 357, 411-413, 423, 428-441 and 576.]

Job enlargement

Job enlargement means increasing the scope of a job through extending the range of its job duties and responsibilities. This contradicts the principles of specialisation and the division of labour whereby work is divided into small units, each of which is performed repetitively by an individual worker. Some motivational theories suggest that the boredom and alienation caused by the division of labour can actually cause efficiency to fall.

Job rotation

Job rotation is an approach to management development, where an individual is moved through a schedule of assignments designed to give him or her a breadth of exposure to the entire operation. Job rotation is also practiced to allow qualified employees to gain more insights into the processes of a company and to increase job satisfaction through job variation. The term job rotation can also mean the scheduled exchange of persons in offices, especially in public offices, prior to the end of incumbency or the legislative period. This has been practiced by the German green party for some time but has been discontinued

Motivation

Motivation in psychology refers to the initiation, direction, intensity and persistence of behavior. [Geen, R. G. (1995), Human motivation: A social psychological approach. Belmont, CA: Cole.] Motivation is a temporal and dynamic state that should not be confused with personality or emotion. Motivation is having the desire and willingness to do something. A motivated person can be reaching for a long-term goal such as becoming a professional writer or a more short-term goal like learning how to spell a particular word. Personality invariably refers to more or less permanent characteristics of an individual's state of being (e.g., shy,extrovert, conscientious. As opposed to motivation, emotion refers to temporal states that do not immediately link to behavior (e.g, anger, grief, happiness).

Process improvement

Process improvement in organizational development is a series of actions taken to identify, analyze and improve existing processes within an organization to meet new goals and objectives. These actions often follow a specific methodology or strategy to create successful results.

Task analysis

Task analysis is the analysis of how a task is accomplished, including a detailed description of both manual and mental activities, task and element durations, task frequency, task allocation, task complexity, environmental conditions, necessary clothing and equipment, and any other unique factors involved in or required for one or more people to perform a given task. This information can then be used for many purposes, such as personnel selection and training, tool or equipment design, procedure design (e.g., design of checklists or decision support systems) and automation.

Example

An information system is a communication system using artefacts in support of a given human activity system. Hence, it could be considered as a classic example of a socio-technical system in that it bridges between a human activity system and an ICT system. An information system is fundamentally concerned with communication in support of human activity using artefacts to represent, store, manipulate and transmit data. The essence of an information system therefore lies not purely in the technology or in the activity: it lies in the way in which technology is used in support of purposeful action [Beynon-Davies P. (2002). Information Systems: an introduction to informatics in Organisations. Palgrave, Basingstoke, UK. ISBN 0-333-96390-3] .

ee also

*List of management topics
*Human factors
*Sociotechnical systems theory

References