Each writer and researcher has his own emphasis when he considers the system. The systems approach came in a big way in organizational analysis and raised the hope of becoming a general and unified theory of orgnaisation. A general and unified theory is one which can be applied to all types of organisations, presenting their comprehensive analysis so that various people who want to study organizations from different angles can drive knowledge. This is what the systems approach was expected to do. However, such promise could not be fulfilled. Systems theory falls short of two requirements: being too abstract and lacking universal application.

1. Abstract Theory. It is felt that systems theory of organisation is too abstract to be of much use to practising managers. It indicates that various parts of the organisation are interrelated; Organizations being part of social system are interrelated. The interrelationship is dynamic. What is fails to indicate is to spell out the precise relationships among there. It is one thing to say that economic forces trigger social, technical, and psychological changes in the organisation. But this is not enough. What is required is a statement of what economic forces initiate what social, technical and psychological changes.

2. Lack of Universal Applicability. Systems approach does not provide action framework work applicable to all types of organisations. For example, modern structural designs, cybernetic control and communication system are not applicable for smaller Organizations. These maybe quite important for large organizations. Since modern Organizations tend to be quite large, many of action framework of systems theory may be quite useful. But, then this is not the role of a theory to prescribe actions for a particular category of organisations, rather, the theory should specify the relationship among different variables which can be applied to all organisations.

In fact, some people believe that systems approach of organisation theory does not offer anything new. They feel that managers have been doing their jobs seeing the problems as a network of interrelated elements with interaction between environments inside and outside of their organizations. This may be true but conscious study of systems has forced managers and scholars to consider more perceptively the various problems of systems management. Looking into these shortcomings of systems approach, researchers have tried to investigate the Organizational phenomena to fill the gap. The result has been the emergence of a new approach-situational and contingency approach is an extension of systems approach.