Organizational Behavior: Attention, Knowledge, and Control Systems. The Learning Organization

Abstract

This paper aims to present organizations as Control Systems, introducing an innovative approach to explain how organizations behave in coping with and adapting to sudden environmental changes. Embracing a cybernetic point of view, it will provide a general model of control system which describes the process that allows the organization to deal efficiently with external stimuli and focus on strategy and goals. Control Systems are considered as a fundamental part of the view of organizations as black boxes with a feedback control, which processes information. I shall demon­strate how organizations carry out their processes and build their organizational activities while linking Control Systems to attention and knowledge as starting and improving points to define viable conditions of survival and learning. In fact, organizations are concerned not only with processing external triggers but also with attention processes which foster knowledge creation, understood as a process according to which external and internal information is absorbed, processed, and structured in models, contributing to the creation of an organizational memory. The faster the organization learns to develop attention and thinking, the readier the entire organization will be to develop organizational learning.