Topic: Situational Leadership, Organization as systems, Lifecycle of Leadership
Open systems model
A good of an open systems organization is Bharti Airtel, a leading integrated telecommunications organization based in New Delhi, India. The company does the business of operating telecom services across the country and it is at present found in 20 countries. Bharti Airtel’s telecommunication activities are broadly categorized into some three service units. These are: 1). Mobile Services, which deals with mobile together with fixed wireless services through the communication technology global system for mobile (GSM) (2). Telemedia Services, which deals with broadband as well as landline telephony in as many as 95 cities across the world, and (3). Enterprise Services, which provides an end-to-end telecommunication solution to a number of corporate and long distance services to carriers. Bharti Airtel has a large clientèle base of over 243 million customers, making it the third largest in the world in terms of telecom operations (Airtel India, 2012).
Bharti Airtel as an open systems company
Bharti Airtel meets the criteria to be categorized as an open systems organization. By definition, an open systems is one that constantly exchanges feedback with its external environment. Accordingly, the general flow of activities at Bharti Airtel is in a large cycle or loop (Cummings, 2008). There is constant exchange of feedback among all the phases. In this sense, the external environment refers to a large scope of needs along with influences which have an effect to the company and are out of the direct control of the company. The influences that the external environment has on the organization are political, economic, societal, ecological as well as technological in nature.
Bharti Airtel is famed as the first mobile company in the world ever to outsource all of its business activities except for marketing, finance and sales operations. As such, maintenance of the company’s network is done by Ericson, Huawei and Nokia Siemens Network. The International Business Machines company (IBM) provides business support functionalities of Bharti Airtel while maintenance of its transmission towers under the mandate of Bharti Infatel Ltd. In this respect, the company regularly exchanges feedback with its environments, carry out thorough analysis of the feedback, make sure to adjust the internal systems as required to meet the goals of the system, and then ensures to transmit the relevant information back out to its environment within the appropriate time frame.
It is in the practice of Bharti Airtel to constantly exchange feedback with its external environment, which explains why it is an effective and high performing global mobile organization. Airtel strives to understand its external environment through such means as use of environmental scanning, together with market research and evaluations.
There are a number of benefits that Bharti Airtel reaps from employing the open systems approach (Dransfield, 2004). First, there is more effective leadership for the mobile company especially as has been demonstrated by its success in the recent past. The leadership of Bharti Airtel has been able to set the pace in the telecommunications industry. For instance, Bharti Airtel has been able to have network maintainer Ericson to agree to be paid by the minute for both installation and maintenance as opposed to being paid up front. In effect, this has enabled Airtel to offer low call rates to its subscribers. This would have been totally impossible if Airtel was a closed system organization (Cummings, 2008). The open systems affords the leadership of the Indian mobile company the chance to understand the overall nature along with the needs of the company and thus giving adequate focus on the more crucial activities like planning the overall direction plus organization of their resources both in the short-tern and long term.
Closed systems
A closed systems organization is the direct opposite of the open system organization. This means that unlike in the case of the latter, the closed system organization are shut off from the outside environment. As such, all of its interaction as well as knowledge is transmitted within the instruments of the company only. It is such the practice of closed system organizations to completely focus on internal activities when explaining or analyzing organizational actions and behavior. The assumption of closed system models is that the external environment which include political decisions, technological advancements, legal decisions and demographic aspects of the community to be stable and highly predictable. Therefore, the main focus is always on the internal aspects which should result in efficient running of the company.
An excellent example of a closed system is a prison. This is because an individual prison has always laid out systems as to how to deal with the internal affairs as opposed to being influenced by outside forces (Allen, 2009). For instance, when there is an abuse of prisoners in the correctional facility the prison administration would employ a closed-system approach by searching for reasons for the abuse within the facility itself, and then reach correctional procedures. Thus the prison administration strives to assess the prison policies, prison cultures, the inmate-inmate interaction, the officer-inmate relationship, correctional officers, prison wardens, among others. What is certain also is that there is hardly any attention paid to the external environment in the effort to identify the root cause of the problems in the prison nor in devising the appropriate remedies to the problems. Indeed the use of the closed-system model serves well the prison because it is an institution lacking competition and all requirements are supplied by the federal government (Singh, 2012).
References:
Airtel India. (2012). Bharti Airtel. Retrieved on April 19, 2012 from: http://www.airtel.in/wps/wcm/connect/about+bharti+airtel/Bharti+Airtel/About+bharti+airtel/
Allen, M. Jennifer. (2009). Administration and Management in Criminal Justice: A Service Quality Approach. New York, SAGE.
Cummings, G. Thomas. (2008). Organization Development & Change. Connecticut, Cengage Learning.
Dransfield, Robert. (2004). Business for Foundation Degrees and Higher Awards. London, Heinemann.
Singh, Mandeep. (2012). Building Customer Loyalty Through Value Added Services: A Case of Telecom Sector. Munich, GRIN Verlag.
