Human Systems Management

The essentials of human motivation is closely related to the essence of humanity and human work. The creative and social activities are the main elements of humanity and are to be involved in human work. It is understood from the comparison of pleasure given by sporting activities and our work. The relationship between creative activities and standardization of work is also discussed. The creative activities are indispensable in our work, and the four steps for the conversion to creative work are investigated.

The paper presents a conceptual model of the office and describes a methodology derived from it. The method was applied in two offices, one at a very early and one at an advanced stage of automation. People in the more highly automated office were found to have relatively more task-dependent connections requiring mutual adjustment, to place more emphasis on social as opposed to standardization influences (rules and procedures) on task performance, to have a more positive view of others as sources of influence on performance, and to have fewer criticisms associated with automation.

Utilizing the concepts of behavior mechanisms and habitual domains, we offer a classification of decision problems and a general principle of effective goal setting as to select control variables (the set of measurable goals, their achievement levels and supportive systems) which can create favorable working conditions and relative high levels of charges and confidence on the performers so that they can allocate as much attention time as possible to perform the desired job-related operations in a most efficient and effective way. We give a detailed discussion on the applications of this principle over various classes of problems.

Guidelines and principles for the design of information systems to support general matching processes are presented. These are based on a new model of matching processes and an analysis of key decision issues. Thus, a fruitful new avenue of inquiry into assignment problems that do not assume perfect information by match participants is opened.

The failure of an organization's information processing capacity to meet its information processing requirements creates the potential for dysfunction. A model of information overload is presented that describes the antecedents (the nature of information and organizational conditions) and consequences (primary and secondary symptoms). The role of structural differentiation and integration in creating and managing overload is discussed. Primary symptomatology reflects the inadequacy of differentiation and integration. Subsequent secondary symptomatology reflects the maladaptive attempts to cope. The possible effects on organizational behavior and strategy are explored.

The board decision making process in two Human Service Organizations was examined through observational methods. Some important difficulties were seen in these processes. Among them were lack of decision, poor timing of decision, swayed focus, and unclear utilization of human energy. The possible reasons for these problems are explored, and some policy implications suggested.

Given a knowledge base that is sufficiently large, organized, and relevant, a few simple and powerful ideas can capture much of the effectiveness of inductive mathematical reasoning. This claim is supported by PM, a program written in a frame-based language. Given a goal, such as ‘Find a relation among the side lengths of a right triangle,’ PM is designed to generate conjectures and to improve its ability to do so. The program repeatedly uses generalization, specialization, and analogy in patterns of plausible inference suggested by Polya. Knowledge is organized by links between entities in the knowledge base so that it need only be searched locally. The point of this paper is to raise the issue of how we should prepare now to manage systems capable of discovery by computer to serve human ends, should it be proved possible.