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Organizational Decision Making in Managing Work Trade-offs: A Resilience Approach
Published in Tom Kontogiannis, Stathis Malakis, Cognitive Engineering and Safety Organization in Air Traffic Management, 2017
Tom Kontogiannis, Stathis Malakis
The present chapter discusses a contemporary view of organizational safety that emphasizes the decision dilemmas or performance trade-offs faced by practitioners and managers in everyday work. A number of studies have recognized practitioners' dilemmas in balancing productivity and safety requirements at the same time (Morel et al. 2008; Gomes et al. 2009; Amalberti 2013). Practitioners have to reach their safety and productivity goals, neither of which should be achieved at the expense of the other. Organizations are also seeking ways to preserve their level of economic performance without degrading their safety margins. As industrial systems grow in complexity, their work demands also increase; for example, do more, faster, cheaper, and better. Organizations try to amplify their own capabilities to control complexity (the viable system model [VSM] principle of variety) by engaging more practitioners in the system (that is, ensure a multiplicity of perspectives), by balancing tasks between practitioners and automation, and by delegating authority to multiple levels in the system. However, this increase in the capabilities and the operating modes of the organization may also create several decision trade-offs, such as multiplicity of views vs. coordination cost, manual vs. automated control, and centralized vs. decentralized control. As a result, many decision trade-offs are created at both the operational and organizational levels that should be resolved in the context of the particular situation. Organizational life is full of small or large decision trade-offs that must be balanced so that the final decision suits the requirements of the problem at hand.
Institutions, Nations, Enterprises and Distributed Organisation (the Westphalian Dilemma)
Published in Cybernetics and Systems, 2022
The Viable System Model as proposed by Beer (1979) suggests five necessary and sufficient systems for organizational viability; he calls them the systems 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 of the viable system. From a functional perspective these five systems can be summarized in three systemic functions; creating, regulating and implementing the organization’s policies. In Figure 2, policy, intelligence and cohesion, relate to policy creation, cohesion and coordination to policy regulation and autonomy within autonomy to policy implementation (Espejo 2008, 2020, Espejo and Reyes 2011). These are three necessary systemic functions for viability.