New organisational issues and macroergonomics: integrating management systems

Abstract

Integration and embedding interrelated concepts has become a major research field crossing over several scientific areas. Benchmarking, globalisation, sustainable development, clouding information flows, flexible work arrangements, democracy in management and teammanship over leadership are, currently, widely discussed issues among the industrial and academic communities. Systems integration has been reported in several technical areas, namely, in sensor development (organic-inorganic), artificial human tissue development and cybernetic projects. Organisational systems integration is also an appealing research field taking into account the number of papers and journals focusing on that matter. It is intended in this paper, of a mostly conceptual nature, to emphasise potential synergies between macroergonomics and integrated management systems (IMS), as complex systems, based on the available literature and on partial results of a survey focusing on Portuguese companies that enabled highlighting organisational IMS features. It is also intended to emphasise the relative position that ergonomics may assume in management systems integration, namely, on the challenges anticipated to the human in this new organisational reality by reporting on an IMS maturity assessment tool considering macroergonomics and other relevant concepts.