Organizational Staffing and the Posting Process

Abstract

The preface to Part III introduced ForestCo’s internal labor market (ILM) from the perspective of staffing decisions and actions and in doing so presented three background models of organizational functioning. These three are the rational-, natural-, and open-system models (Scott, 1992), which provide different vantage points and sets of assumptions that can be used to frame interpretations of organizational activities. Rational models are consistent with perspectives that emphasize bureaucratic rationality. In these models, the individual job performance maps aggregationally onto overall organizational performance and the accomplishment of established organizational goals and objectives. Natural models are those that emphasize social-system aspects of organizations. Maintenance of the social system of the organization is considered to be important in conjunction with issues such as individual motivation and maintenance of work group identities. Open-system models of organizations are those that consider organizations to be interdependent with their environments.