Implications of Systems Thinking for Research and Practice in Management

This paper sets out to examine two main ideas. The first is to assess the impact that Systems Thinking can have on Management Science and the second is to examine a set of ideas that point the way that Management Science and Systems Science may find common ground. In the first section of the paper a simple systems idea. Causal Loop Diagrams, made popular by Senge [20] is examined in the light of its ability to provide insight into House's Path Goal Theory of Leadership. This theory is used as an illustrative example of the strengths and weaknesses of using Causal Loop Diagrams. The obvious conclusion is that this methodology gives insights into causation which are unavailable in the normal context but is unable to provide any level of useful quantatitive analysis. The second part of the paper takes one idea about leadership behaviour, namely, the ability of the leader to mediate the impact of a turbulent environment. That idea is examined in terms of the leader's behaviour being seen as a dissipating system or a negative feedback loop. This serves as the starting point for a discussion of a number of related ideas and their implications for Management Science. This suggests a methodology that examines relative and quantifiable causation.