Socio-Technical Systems

TUI University

Essay submitted by: Jorge E. Pacheco
Assignment: Module 1, Case Assignment
MGT501 - Mgmt. and Org. Behavior

Professor: Dr. Charles Franquet

November 29, 2010

How the “socio” part of the socio-technical system causes the Telebank Call
Center to be something other than a perfectly smoothly functioning machine.

Even though I am a small business owner and havebeen exposed to supervisory and senior management position through other jobs, I had not heard before about the term “socio-technical systems.” However, after going through the module’s readings, I am glad to realize that, in an intuitively way, I already knew about this concept, I simply needed a term to define it.
What is a socio-technical system? The theory of socio-technical systems(STS) is a process based on team-oriented work and its direct relationship with technology, which developed as a way to spread democratic values and human rights in the workplace. Social-technical systems include hardware, software, physical surroundings, procedures, laws and regulations, data and data structures, and –most important of all- people (Computingcases.org, 2010).
Theories aboutsocio-technical systems were officially accepted in the 1060s and were introduced by Eric Trist and Fred Emery. During this time researchers tried to figure out why the implementation of new technologies didn’t deliver the expected result. Most of the time, organizations blamed their human resources arguing that they already had “their ways” and wouldn’t want to change with the time. However,researchers found out that sometimes the issue was not the human resources, but the way technology aligned with the individuals using it (Information on Socio-technical Systems, 2010).
Researches found that if organizations wanted to keep growing and improving the internal performance of all departments, it was necessary to make an effort to know all the methods to create a working relationshipbetween the human power and technology and the values of individuals and its relationship with the corporate rules and policies.
What do socio-technical systems do with all that? Socio-technical systems try to broaden the knowledge of each person in the organization, and, along with technology, encourage every employee to develop a set of skills to get results. According to Griffin andMoorhead (Organizational Behavior, 1986), organizations that use STS should structure the task, authority, and hierarchy in the group work, delegating decisions regarding job assignments, training, inspection, rewards and punishments to the group. The objective is to optimize both technical and social systems for the benefit of the organization in general – a concept that is supported by basicorganizational theories such as work specialization, chain of command, authority, delegation and more (Cliff Notes, 2010).
From a small business owner perspective, I believe that organizations implementing a consistent social-technical system the can have greater productivity because of job satisfaction; which leads to lower absenteeism and lower job turnover. One of the main goals of asocio-technical system is to produce a system that is able to adapt to change and make best use of creative abilities of an individual and they way such abilities are applied in conjunction with the individual’s environment. However, once we start talking about job satisfaction, creative abilities, and individuals, a more complex issue comes up to light: individual values and corporate rules and policies.When individual values clash against corporate rules and policies, workers get discouraged and stop performing. People tend to perform and get engaged with the organization when their values are met because they finally feel like they belong. If a company says “we want you to be yourself,” but at the time the person gets hired they changed the story to “be yourself, but not around here,” most...