LINEARISED SYSTEMIC ROLES OF PARTICIPANTS IN COMPLEX ORGANIZATIONS

Wolfgang Eber

Abstract:

In construction management as well as in real estate development an appropriate stakeholder analysis is essential to determine the roles a particular participant plays within the complex system of a project. This is, since though a major part of the projects' organization is available for being constructed sensibly, stakeholders typically reside outside the reach of being subjected to organizing but have to be taken as they are. So, at least they need to be understood regarding their ability to mirror the systems' behaviour and stability or possibly impact, control and steer the development of the organization. Only then, the respective players can be treated accordingly and efforts to make an organization travel safely toward the expected goal can be expected to be successful. Approaches based on systems theory are well-known, indicating the participants' roles as being active, reactive, buffering or critical to some measurable degree. However, these values suffer from non-linearity and fail to reflect on dominating causal cycles within the organization. This paper proposes some progress on elaborating these values towards more meaningfulness. Linearizing these characteristics offers to remove some criticized faults and helps to introduce the more appropriate parameters leverage, criticality and recursiveness for better reflecting the systems' dependency on the singular players and, hence, allows for their improved handling. Therewith, more stable systems, i.e., organizations are to be expected and, hence, quite more safely approaching the projects' target.