Holistic and Reductionist Thinker: A Comparison Study Based on Individuals, Skillset and Personality Types

Abstract

As organizations operate in turbulent and complex environments, it has become a necessity to assess the systems thinking (ST) skills, personality types (PTs), and demographics of practitioners. In this study, we investigated the relationship between practitioners ST profile, their PTs profiles and demographic characteristics in the domain of complex system problems. The objective of this study is to address the current gap in the literature lack of studies dedicated to predicting practitioners ST profile based on their PTs and demographics characteristics. A total of 258 practitioners with different demographics and PTs provided the data. The results show that (1) practitioners can be classified based on their ST skills scores into two clusters: holistic and reductionist (that is, ST profile), (2) each cluster has different PTs profiles and demographic characteristics, and (3) practitioners ST profile can be predicted, with good accuracy, based on their PTs profile and demographic characteristics.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 01, 2021
Accession Number
AD1134164

Entities

People

  • Michael Hamilton
  • Morteza Nagahi
  • Raed Jaradat
  • Safae El Amrani
  • Simon R. Goerger

Organizations

  • Engineer Research and Development Center

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Human Systems
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Accuracy
  • Applied Psychology
  • Classification
  • Complex Systems
  • Computational Science
  • Computers
  • Data Mining
  • Demography
  • Engineering
  • Engineers
  • Industrial Engineering
  • Information Science
  • Information Systems
  • Management Personnel
  • Network Science
  • Neural Networks
  • Organizational Structure
  • Personality
  • Psychology
  • Social Psychology
  • Students
  • System Of Systems
  • Systems Engineering
  • Thinking

Readers

  • Electrochemical Surface Science
  • Psychometric Testing or Psychological Assessment.
  • Systems Analysis and Design