Dissipative properties of a composite system interacting with an environment are studied in order to obtain insight into relaxation and decoherence phenomena. As a typical system with internal degree of freedom, a Jaynes–Cummings (JC) model is considered where a spin (qubit) interacts with a single bosonic mode. When the whole system is initially in a state of at most single excitation, the model becomes solvable for excitation number conserving Hamiltonians, even if the JC system interacts with its environment composed of harmonic oscillators. Effects of initial correlations between the system and the environment are also taken into account. Basic equations for the density matrix are solved exactly to determine dynamics of the reduced systems. Mutually related problems of initial correlations, entanglement and non-Markovian property are studied explicitly by examining the time evolution of the reduced density matrices, the concurrence and the trace distance.