You can see that the human relations and human resources approaches to management have had a huge impact on the plight of organizational members. No longer is an employee a “cog in the machine” as in the classical approach; an employee is now a person with feelings and ambitions who is a valuable, contributing member of an organization. But there is another approach to management that is less concerned with the uniqueness of individual needs or organizational goals and instead focuses on the interconnectedness of the parts of an organization. The systems approach views an organization as a unique whole made up of important members who have interdependent relationships within their particular environment (Monge, 1977). Much like an ecosystem in which plants, animals, and weather patterns all affect one another, so too do the members of an organization, as well as outside forces in the environment: all affect each other and the organization as a whole.

Figure 11.1 shows how a college or university works as a system. Its members include faculty, students, office staff, financial aid staff, and the bursar, all of whom have relationships and interactions with one another. The college exists within an environment, which includes other systems that directly affect it. These other systems might be the city and state where the college is located, the legislature that sets tuition, local employers who offer students full-time or part-time jobs, the families that the students come from or live with, and the high schools that supply many of the students.

Two of the most important components of organizations as systems are openness and adaptability. Openness in a system refers to an organization’s awareness of its own imbalances and problems. Using our university example, let’s say that our college begins receiving messages from local elementary schools that the university’s student teachers seem poorly prepared for the classroom. The university has two choices: it can ignore this feedback about the health of its program, or it can look to correct the problem, perhaps restructuring its elementary education program with feedback from local educators, professors, students, and government and policy representatives. The latter choice clearly helps the organization move forward by allowing for change and growth in light of changing times and circumstances. This ability to adjust is known as adaptability. And at the heart of it all is communication. If everyone involved in the system, from students to professors to principals, keeps to themselves and never voices concerns or ideas, the system can become closed and collapse under the weight of its own problems.