Contemporary Approaches and Environments of a Business
By: Deanna Crawford
April 2, 2015
MT 140-10: Intro to Management
Instructor Young
Kaplan University

The contemporary approaches to management include: sociotechnical theory, quantitative management, organizational behavior, and systems theory. Regarding environments, an organization has an internal environment, a competitive environment, and a macroenvironment. I have been granted the opportunity to explain how these approaches are different from one another, define an “open system”, describe internal, competitive, and macro-environments of and organization, and express how the contemporary approaches are relevant in the three environments. I would like to begin be explaining how sociotechnical theory, quantitative management, organizational behavior, and systems theory are different from one another.
Sociotechnical systems theory is a contemporary approach to management that says that a proper combination of workers (the social system) and their knowledge, training and tools (the technical system) leads to organizational effectiveness in satisfying customers. Emphasis: Social + Technical. Quantitative management is another contemporary approach to management that prioritizes mathematical or statistical analysis as basis for decisions. Emphasis: Quantitative analysis. The organizational behavior contemporary approach mainly considers the behaviors and interactions of workers. Emphasis: Individual and group behaviors. Systems theory shows that the organization’s performance depends on how effective it is in providing goods or services using inputs from the external environment. Emphasis: Changing inputs into outputs. In the systems theory contemporary approach to management, an open system is a set of components and processes, i.e. the organization, subject to the influence of the external environment. The organization is an open system because its components and processes change due to external factors.
The internal environment of an organization is the set of employees, processes and components inside the organization. The competitive environment of an organization involves the organization and other players that compete in the market. The macro-environment of an organization involves other variables beyond the market, such as the social, political, legal and technological variables.
The sociotechnical systems approach is relevant to the internal environment, because the focus of this contemporary approach to management is on