To explore the integration of social and technical aspects of an organization. Briefing Organizations are socio-technical systems. This means that technology – equipment, machines, processes, materials, layout – has to work alongside people – structures, roles, role relationships, job design. You can’t design an organization to suit the technology while ignoring the people, because that would be ineffective. Similarly, designing an organization just to suit the people, while ignoring the requirements of the technology, would be equally disastrous. The concept of socio-technical system design means that the social system and the technical system have to be designed so that they can work with each other. Let’s consider Old McDonald’s farm. On this farm, he had no pigs, cows, or chickens. He had only corn, planted in long rows that grew all year round. McDonald had a perfect environment for growing corn. The soil was rich, and the climate was perfect, twelve months every year. McDonald’s rows were so long that at one end of the row, the soil was being prepared for planting, while the next section on that row was being planted, the next section was growing, and the next was being harvested. McDonald had four of these long rows. McDonald is a progressive and scientific farmer. He is concerned about both productivity and quality. He had an industrial engineer study the amount of effort required to complete the work in each function on each row. He found that two employees were required per section, on each row, fully employed in that function all year round. Therefore, he employed eight workers on each row. Initially, Mr McDonald had only four rows, A, B, C and D, and a total of 32 people. But he decided to expand, adding two more rows. This added 16 more workers. Now he had 48 employees. Until this time, he had only one supervisor responsible for directing the work of all 32 employees on the initial four rows. Now he decided that there was too much work for one supervisor. He added another. Mr McDonald now had to decide whether to reorganize the work of his managers and employees. He decided to talk to his two supervisors, Mr Jones and Mr Smith. He found that they had very different ideas. Mr Jones insisted that the only intelligent way to organize was around the technical knowledge, the functional expertise. He argued that he should take responsibility for all employees working on the first two sections, soil preparation and planting, on all rows. Mr Smith, he acknowledged, had greater expertise in growing and harvesting, so he would take responsibility for all employees in the last two sections. They would each have an equal number of employees to supervise. Mr Smith had a different idea. He argued that, while some specialized knowledge was needed, it was more important for the employees to take responsibility for the entire growing cycle. This way, they could move down the row, seeing the progress of the corn. He argued for organizing the employees into teams by row.

Mr McDonald has hired you as a consultant to help him with his organization design. The questions that he wants you to answer are: 

1. How will you organize employees on the farm, and how will you assign responsibility to Smith and Jones? You can recommend any assignment that you like, but the numbers of employees that are required will stay the same.

2. What socio-technical principles support your recommendations? Why is your approach better than the alternatives? 

If you were one of Mr McDonald’s employees, which approach to organization design would you prefer, and why?

Transcribed Image Text:

row A row B row C row D row E row F soil prep planting growing harvesting