A system theoretic approach to the management of complex organizations: Management by consensus level and its interaction with other management strategies

This article deals with decision making at the organization level of living systems. It develops concepts presented in a previous article (Walker & Gelfand, 1979), which discusses a modeling technique for control systems that attempts to accommodate a manager's limited scope of rational action in the face of organizational and control system complexity. The modeling context used also provides a setting in which some management strategies may be formalized as equivalence relations. In particular, the previous article interprets the formal concepts of internal homogeneity, forcibility, and input span as managerial control strategies: management by exception, management by priority, and management by input span, respectively. This present article introduces a further equivalence relation, extended threshold, and suggests that this may be interpreted as management by consensus level. This notion of extended threshold is examined in detail, together with its interactions with internal homogeneity and forcibility. It is shown that systemwide control may be effected by manipulating levels of each of the three managerial strategies.