MNG10247: Managing Organisations - Reflective Essay Writing Assessment Answers

Open System Management and its importance in quality of services

The aim of this reflection is to focus on the positive sides of open system management. To do that, first of all a detailed analysis on the background of open system management will be done and after that real life organisational example will be used to ensure the importance of open system management. An open system management is a system in which the organisation has external interactions in the form of energy, information or material transfers. The open system is exactly opposite of isolated system. It guides the entire set of organisations, institutional sectors and units within the organisations. The components of open system management are inputs, outputs, technology, organisational behaviour and processes, environment, culture, systems dynamics, structure, etc. (Boje & Gephert, 2009). As per my understanding an organisation is an assembly of people who are working together to achieve a common goal. Business organisations ate formed to deliver goods or services to the customers in a manner that at the end they can realise profit. Organisation was divided into two major parts that are open system and closed system. The traditional theorists have considered organisation as a closed or isolated system. But this traditional theory failed to take into account many environment issues that have a huge impact over the efficiency of an organisation. In this manner the open system of management has emerged. I have observed that the term open system has reflected on the belief that all organisations are different and unique in their functioning and this is because of the unique environment in which they operate.

The environment in open system management refers to the government, agencies, suppliers, distributors and competitors with whom the organisations interact and get affected directly or indirectly. I have noticed that of all the factors there are four most significant factors that form a part in open system these factors are cultural values, economic conditions, political or legal environment. I also learnt that the open system management is based on the assumption that all large organizations are comprised of subsystems and each subsystem receives input from another subsystem. In this manner the open system management works in hierarchy and all the subsystems have to follow that hierarchy (Cherrington, 2009). I have experienced this in many organisations and to justify the assumption of open system management I am discussing a live story of open system management from an organisation where I have worked.

In an organisation XYZ ltd. the customers and management have compliant regarding the quality of services. This issue is brought to the manager and the manager is of the opinion that the degrading services are because of organisation’s inability to recruit the staff that is experienced and competent and this is further because of wage rates that are non-competitive. Here the role of environmental components is very strong. Just because the other organisations (competitors) are paying high wages the performance of organisation is getting affected to a very great extent. This is the significance of open system management. In this case the organisation is now required to revise the wages and make them competitive so as to attract and retain competitive staff. In this example the organisation has appointed consultant to look into the matter and the consultant searched for links between open system components and present problem and found out the problems with employee training, definition of job responsibilities, inadequate co-ordination. In this situation the open system management model has helped in redefining the problem and solving them out. This suggests that open system management is very crucial for an organisation to solve the problems. The problem that this organisation is facing seem to be an internal problem on the very first instance but after careful observation it has been found out that the problem is because of competitor’s policies and wages and this is why the organisation is suffering. Thus the open system management suggests that it is very necessary to carefully observe the external environmental norms and then make the organisational policies as per that (Galbraith, 2009)

My experience about open system management in organizations is very positive and supports the fact that this system is an integral part of all the organisations because it takes into consideration all the external aspects that have huge impact over decision making in the organisations (Hatch, 2010). In this manner open system management not only helps in effective decision making but it also helps in making policies and achieving competitive advantage.