The systemic mind and a conceptual framework for the psychosocial environment of business enterprises: Practical implications for systemic leadership training
Abstract
This chapter introduces a research-based conceptual framework for the study of inner psychosocial reality of business enterprises. It is called the Inner Organizational Ecosystem Approach (IOEA).
This model is systemic in nature and it defines the basic features of small and medium-size enterprises, such as elements, structures, borders, social actors, organizational climate, processes, and resources. Further, it also covers the dynamics of psychosocial reality, processes, emergent qualities, and higher-order subsystems of the overall organizational ecosystem, including the global business environment, which is understood as a macro-system where all the individual organizational ecosystems co-exist.
In the applied part of the chapter, cognitive changes emerging within systemic leadership training are defined. Participation in systemic training causes changes in cognitive processing of reality, more specifically improvements in layer-based framing, relativistic contextual orientation, temporality drift, and meaning generation.
All these changes are components of systemic mind, what is the concept newly proposed and defined by the present study. The systemic mind is a living matrix that is extremely open to acquiring new skills, new patterns of thinking, analyzing and meaning generation.
It is processual and it can be considered as an ongoing process of continuous absorption of new cognitive patterns. Both, the Inner Organizational Ecosystem Approach and the concept of systemic mind provide new theoretical background for empirical investigation in the fields of systemic and systems psychology, complexity psychology, organizational psychology, economic anthropology, and social anthropology of work.