The external environment within which the organization exists, and to which it must adapt for its very survival, is as significant a managerial parameter as the technology in the organization. Today's organization is to conceptualize as an open system...
The external environment within which the organization exists, and to which it must adapt for its very survival, is as significant a managerial parameter as the technology in the organization. Today's organization is to conceptualize as an open system, and to recognize the importance of its environment.
The purpose of this paper is to present a good deal of studies about organizational environment and environment-organization interactive system, and to analyze its properties and its role in the functioning of the organization. At first, this paper treats the concept of environment in terms of environmental systems and interaction between the formal organization and its external environment. In this sense, Emery and Trist argued the causal texture of the environment as the need for the additional environment concept.
Organization-environment interaction is described in the context of selected theoretical constructs and empirical studies. On the theoretical side. Thompson concepturized EO interaction as a system of output transactions accomplished through output roles in a context of organizational rationality. Katz and Kahn advance the idea of the adaptive system, and Evan proposes the organization-set idea. On the empirical side, several studies tend to support the theoretical linkage between the organization and the environment.
In these studies, complexity and rate of change are the most relevant characteristics of organizational environment. To reduce the complexity of many interrelationships that characterize organization-environmental interaction, it is necessary to classify the organizational environments by typologies of organizational environments.
Among the many classifications or typologies of organizational environment are (1) Thompson's classification along a homogeneous-heterogeneous continuum and a stable-shifting continuum, (2) Lawrence and Lorsch's continua of diversity and dynamism, (3) Jurkovisch's multivariate typology, and (4) Hill's typology based on stability and independence or interconnectedness. Especially, Emery and Trist's classification of environmental textures is the most comprehensive and meaningful typology.