Density Delay and Organizational Survival: Computational Models and Empirical Comparisons

Research on the ecological dynamics oforganizational populations has demonstrated that competitiveconditions at the time of founding have enduring effects onorganizational survival. According to ecological theories,organizational life chances are systematically affected by density (the number of organizations in a population) at thetime of founding because the lower resource endowments thatcharacterize organizations appearing in periods of highpopulation density tend to become self-reinforcing, and—over time—amplify differences in mortality rates oforganizations founded under different conditions. However,credible arguments have been offered that could justify both positive and negative effects of the delayed effectsof population density on organizational mortality rates, andreceived empirical research in part reflects this ambiguity.To develop new insight into this issue and to explore theboundaries of received empirical results, in this study wepresent a computational model of organizational evolutionaccording to which the global dynamics of organizationalpopulations emerge from the iteration of simple rules oflocal interaction among individual organizations. We use the synthetic data produced by simulation to estimate eventhistory models of organizational mortality, and compare theparameter estimates with those reported in the most recentempirical studies of actual organizational populations. Theconclusions supported by the model qualify and extendreceived empirical results, and suggest that delayed effectsof density are highly sensitive the details of local structure of connections among members of organizationalpopulations.     

Communication and organizational social networks: a simulation model

Recent management research has evidenced the significance of organizational social networks, and communication is believed to impact the interpersonal relationships. However, we have little knowledge on how communication affects organizational social networks. This paper studies the dynamics between organizational communication patterns and the growth of organizational social networks. We propose an organizational social network growth model, and then collect empirical data to test model validity. The simulation results agree well with the empirical data. The results of simulation experiments enrich our knowledge on communication with the findings that organizational management practices that discourage employees from communicating within and across group boundaries have disparate and significant negative effect on the social network’s density, scalar assortativity and discrete assortativity, each of which correlates with the organization’s performance. These findings also suggest concrete measures for management to construct and develop the organizational social network.     

Determination of Stock for Sales Promotions

This paper describes the solution of the practical problems encountered by a Company when a product is made and sold for a limited promotional period only. The production and inventory control aspects are considered and a system aimed at the reduction of obsolescence costs is described which is based on a model of the demand pattern which uses a Gompertz exponential growth curve. Under pressure for an early improvement from the organisation, a system based on an empirical model was implemented, as an interim measure, which achieved a considerable improvement in performance. The Gompertz model has now been put into operation and the results of a simulation model are presented indicating that further improvements can be achieved.     

Performance of Organizational Design Models and Their Impact on Organization Learning

The performance of various organizational structures is an essential parameter in the reengineering of organizations, particularly in the current rapidly changing, competitive and information technology-dependent environment. This situation has generally resulted in a smaller workforce confronted with voluminous information-processing requirements. Naturally, the focus has been on the design of organzations that will support effective and efficient learning processes. This specific study is on the contingency modely by Ouksel et al. (1997) on the impact of organizational structure on organizational learning and performance. It expands the empirical evaluation of the model to test its robustness. This is done by conducting extensive simulations with (a) a larger number of variables in the decision tasks, and (b) a larger set of numbers for each of the numeric variables, than has been used in the past. Overall, the validity of previous results achieved has been confirmed, but the selection of the most appropriate design, that which will indeed improve learning, is even more nuanced than past studies have concluded.     

Modeling centralized organization of organizational change

Organizations change with the dynamics of the world. To enable organizations to change, certain structures and capabilities are needed. As all processes, a change process has an organization of its own. In this paper it is shown how within a formal organization modeling approach also organizational change processes can be modeled. A generic organization model (covering both organization structure and behavior) for organizational change is presented and formally evaluated for a case study. This model takes into account different phases in a change process considered in Organization Theory literature, such as unfreezing, movement and refreezing. Moreover, at the level of individuals, the internal beliefs and their changes are incorporated in the model. In addition, an internal mental model for (reflective) reasoning about expected role behavior is included in the organization model.     

Learning to align organizational design and data

The relationship between organizational learning and organizational design is explored. In particular, we examine the information processing aspects of organizational learning as they apply to a two-valued decision making task and the relation of such aspects to organizational structure. Our primary contribution is to extend Carley's (1992) model of this process. The original model assumes that all data input into the decision making processes are of equal importance or weight in determining the correct overall organizational decision. The extension described here allows for the more natural situation of non-uniform weights of evidence. Further extensions to the model are also discussed. Such organizational learning performance measures provide an interesting framework for analyzing the recent trend towards flatter organizational structures. This research suggests that flatter structures are not always better, but rather that data environment, ultimate performance goals, and relative need for speed in learning can be used to form a contingency model for choosing organizational structure.     

Impact of quality on competitive advantage and organizational performance

Effective quality improvement has become a potentially valuable way of securing competitive advantage and improving organizational performance. This research conceptualizes and develops a framework that links quality, competitive advantage, and organizational performance. Data for the study were collected from 74 organizations and the relationships proposed in the framework were tested using structural equation modelling. The results indicate that quality improvement can lead to enhanced competitive advantage and improved organizational performance. The contribution of the paper is that it provides empirical support for direct and indirect effects of quality on organizational performance and competitive advantage in Tunisia.     

组织公平对知识共享行为的影响及其对策研究——以河北省国有企业为例

员工间知识共享行为作为企业知识资源的积累和更新的重要来源为企业发展提供了动力源泉,另一方面员工间知识共享行为又受到组织环境、员工观念、技术环境等多方面制约。本文以河北省国有企业员工为研究对象,以组织公平为前因变量,组织嵌入为中介变量,知识共享行为为因变量构建理论模型,并且检验了三者之间的关系。研究结果显示:组织公平、组织嵌入对知识共享行为存在显著正向影响,其中组织嵌入在组织公平与知识共享行为之间存在部分中介作用。     

The Other Side of the Network Coin: Cost Considerations of Network Structure

The purpose of this study is to investigate the differential impact that inter-organizational network connections have on organizational level change. Drawing from the strategic leaning perspective on adaptation, this study investigates how the nature of inter-organizational ties among top management impact the cost and the effectiveness of an organizational level change process. To build on the existing empirical work in this area, this study employs a virtual experiment to create a controlled laboratory investigation of the hypothesized relationships among the strength, formalization, and functional equivalence of network ties; and the cost and effectiveness of an organizational change process. The findings of this study provide support for the strength of weak ties argument and structural hole theory, in addition to suggesting a caveat to Galbraith's information processing model. Furthermore, the results reveal that the tradeoff between increasing effectiveness and decreasing costs is not universally applicable across all decisions regarding network structure.     

A Dynamic Simulation Comparing Classical and Emergent-Network Models: Organizational Design Implications

In the last decade, organizations have spent more on the creation, transformation, and communication of information than on the production of physical goods. The information age has been ushered in by the widespread assimilation of information and communication technologies. Many contemporary practitioners and organizational theorists predict the demise of the classical organizational design because of its inability to accommodate the sociological change engendered by the information age.The current study advances an emergent-network model of organizational design and compares it to the classical approach through a dynamic simulation of prototypical organizational activities. Organizational activities approximating one year were simulated in each of five organizations under constant baseline conditions and over one hundred experimental design conditions. The emergent network model manifested higher levels of goal attainment, resource utilization, and organizational capacity for accommodating change. These findings suggest that organizations will benefit from conformance to the design principals of the emergent-network model.Bernard D. Hill Jr. earned his Ph.D. in Public Policy and Administration from Virginia Commonwealth University. He also holds a Master of Science in Business and a Bachelor of Science in Education. Bernard is currently employed as a Chief Information Officer with the Commonwealth of Virginia. He has held a broad array of technology leadership positions in both the public and private sectors and the academic arena. Bernard was selected as one of Computerworld’s Premier 100 IT Leaders for 2002. As CIO for the Virginia Department of Transportation, he also brokered a public-private partnership that won a nationwide Government Technology Leadership Award. This partnership provides security awareness training for employees in Virginia State government, as well as cities, counties, and localities throughout Virginia.Heinz Roland Weistroffer is an Associate Professor of Information Systems in the School of Business at Virginia Commonwealth University. Roland holds a Doctor of Science degree from the Free University Berlin, Germany, and a Master of Arts degree from Duke University. Previous appointments include Chief Research Officer at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Pretoria, South Africa, and Senior Lecturer at the University of Natal in Durban, South Africa. Roland’s current research interests include computer assisted decision support, computer simulation modeling, object oriented modeling, and software engineering. He has published in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, the Journal of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, and Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, among other journals.Peter Aiken is Director of the Institute for Data Research and an Associate Professor of Information Systems at Virginia Commonwealth University. His research has widely explored the area of data engineering and its relationship to systems and business reengineering. He is the author of Data Reverse Engineering and Clive Finkelstein’s co-author of Corporate Information Portals (McGraw-Hill 1996/99). His sixth book is titled XML in Data Management and is co-authored with David Allen. He has held leadership positions with the US Department of Defense and consulted with more than 50 organizations in 14 different counties. His research publications have appeared in the Communications of the ACM, IBM Systems Journal, IEEE Software and many others. He is a member of ACM, and the IEEE (Senior Member). He has been a DAMA International Advisor since 1999 and received their 2001 International Achievement Award. He has lectured internationally on these and related topics.     

民企家长型领导、组织承诺与组织绩效的关系研究

以广东、广西68家民营企业的159名管理者及员工的调查结果为样本,实证分析了民企家长型领导、组织承诺与组织绩效的关系.研究发现:家长型领导行为中德行领导对组织承诺及组织绩效具有较大程度的影响,仁慈领导能够有效地促进员工组织承诺的提升并改善组织绩效,而威权领导则不利于员工组织承诺的提升.组织承诺在德行领导和仁慈领导与组织绩效的关系中有着积极的中介作用,在威权领导与组织绩效间的关系不明确.     

组织惯例演化的博弈分析

随着全球经济系统的日趋复杂和快速变化,持续性变革已经成为企业生存和发展的内在需要.组织惯例作为组织行为的基本要素和组织能力的载体,可以反映企业内在的深层变革.运用生物学隐喻,深入剖析了企业演化的机制;并在此基础上,运用演化博弈模型对组织惯例演化的路径选择进行了模拟分析;最后探讨了组织惯例演化的主要影响因素,并通过案例研究,对演化博弈模型进行了例证.     

Computational organizational network modeling: Strategies and an example

This paper articulates the logic of computational organizational modeling as a strategy for theory construction and testing in the field of organizational communication networks. The paper introduces, Blanche, and objectoriented simulation environment that supports quantitative modeling and analysis of the evolution of organizational networks. Blanche relies on the conceptual primitives of attributes that describe network nodes and links that connect these nodes. Difference equations are used to model the dynamic properties of the network as it changes over time. This paper describes the design of Blanche and how it supports both the process of theory construction, model building and analysis of results. The paper concludes with an empirical example, to test the predictions of a network-based social influence model for the adoption of a new communication technology in the workplace.     

The relationship between quality management practices and their effects on quality outcomes

Recent research into quality management has examined the relationship between quality management and performance. The purpose of this study is to identify the relationships between quality management practices, and to examine the direct and indirect effects of these practices on quality outcomes by means of replication research. The paper uses a path analysis and a research model is tested using cross-section data collected from 106 certified firms in Spain. The findings support the relationships between quality management practices and the positive impact of these practices on quality outcomes. Evidence is also found confirming previous research showing that a firm could transfer the organizational forms and behaviours underlying quality management to other countries with similar cultures. However, as minor differences emerge, managers should consider the cultural issues. The contribution of the paper is that it provides empirical support for direct and indirect effects of quality management on performance in Spain compared to previous studies carried out in USA and Korea.     

The Effect of Organizational Communication Media on Organizational Culture and Performance: An Agent-Based Simulation Model

This paper examines the mutual relationship between the communication richness of media used for conducting organizational communication and organizational culture. The richness of the media influences how well the organization might maintain its culture. On the other hand, a strong organizational culture allows a more effective use of the media by providing members with some of the necessary common ground to better understand the information exchanged. These relationships are investigated using an agent-based simulation model (ABM). Our ABM incorporates many partial theories into a coherent and fully defined model, which helps formalize and integrate those theories. Our model allows us to analyze non-linearities and interaction effects, which are difficult to investigate using other techniques. Additionally, the ABM allows us to investigate the dynamics of the phenomenon and generate hypotheses that could then be tested using empirical studies. Given the substantial resources necessary to conduct empirical studies, we think that the present ABM is valuable in helping guide data collection efforts. In this paper, we present results that show that organizational culture can influence the effectiveness of the media used for organizational communication and that a high media richness can help maintain and stabilize a culture. The effect of media richness on organizational culture depends on the initial strength of the culture. In general, for a given richness of the media, an initially strong culture stabilizes faster and becomes stronger through time than an initially weak culture. Additionally, the model suggests that a stable network of contacts among agents fosters a high achievement of organizational tasks. Conversely, when agents are forced to establish contacts with agents outside the usual network for doing their work, the accomplishment of tasks decreases.     

Inferring final organizational outcomes from intermediate outcomes of exploration and exploitation: the complexity link

The difficulty in definitively linking outcomes of managerial action to organizational outcomes has been a festering issue in organizational research. The problem arises because it is not easy to separate the distinctive contributions of managers at intermediate stages, as well as the contribution of external factors beyond the control of managers. Specifically, certain managerial actions focusing on exploratory or exploitative innovation produce an intermediate output, organizational knowledge. From this base of organizational knowledge, further management actions craft the final output that eventually faces the market test. Drawing from complexity concepts, I argue that the probability of correctly fashioning the subset of key elements in the intermediate output may be a good measure of the probability of organizational success. I use March’s iconic computational simulation model to demonstrate the merits of this principle. I model the effect of complexity on managerial intentionality towards exploratory and exploitative innovation. I elicit important insights for research and practice by comparing organizational knowledge outcomes with the outcomes for probability of organizational success, in stable and moderately turbulent environment.     

Computational and mathematical organization theory: Perspective and directions

Computational and mathematical organization theory is an interdisciplinary scientific area whose research members focus on developing and testing organizational theory using formal models. The community shares a theoretical view of organizations as collections of processes and intelligent adaptive agents that are task oriented, socially situated, technologically bound, and continuously changing. Behavior within the organization is seen to affect and be affected by the organization's, position in the external environment. The community also shares a methodological orientation toward the use of formal models for developing and testing theory. These models are both computational (e.g., simulation, emulation, expert systems, computer-assisted numerical analysis) and mathematical (e.g., formal logic, matrix algebra, network analysis, discrete and continuous equations). Much of the research in this area falls into four areas: organizational design, organizational learning, organizations and information technology, and organizational evolution and change. Historically, much of the work in this area has been focused on the issue how should organizations be designed. The work in this subarea is cumulative and tied to other subfields within organization theory more generally. The second most developed area is organizational learning. This research, however, is more tied to the work in psychology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence than to general organization theory. Currently there is increased activity in the subareas of organizations and information technology and organizational evolution and change. Advances in these areas may be made possible by combining network analysis techniques with an information processing approach to organizations. Formal approaches are particularly valuable to all of these areas given the complex adaptive nature of the organizational agents and the complex dynamic nature of the environment faced by these agents and the organizations.This paper was previously presented at the 1995 Informs meeting in Los Angeles, CA.     

The Cricket and the Ant: Organizational Trade-offs in Changing Environments

Organizations face trade-offs when they adopt strategies in changing resource environments. The type of trade-off depends on the type of resource change. This paper offers an organizational trade-off model for quantitative resource changes. We call it the “Cricket and Ant” (CA) model, because the pertaining strategies resemble the cricket and ant's behavior in La Fontaine's famous fable. We derive theorems in this CA model in First Order Logic, which we also use to demonstrate that two theory fragments of organizational ecology, i.e., niche width theory and propagation strategy theory, obtain as variant cases of CA; their predictions on environmental selection preferences derive as theorems once their respective boundary conditions are represented in the formal machinery.     

A longitudinal study of evolving networks in response to natural disaster

In this study, we present a longitudinal analysis of the evolution of interorganizational disaster coordination networks (IoDCNs) in response to natural disasters. There are very few systematic empirical studies which try to quantify the optimal functioning of emerging networks dealing with natural disasters. We suggest that social network analysis is a useful method for exploring this complex phenomenon from both theoretical and methodological perspective aiming to develop a quantitative assessment framework which could aid in developing a better understanding of the optimal functioning of these emerging IoDCN during natural disasters. This analysis highlights the importance of utilizing network metrics to investigate disaster response coordination networks. Results of our investigation suggest that in disasters the rate of communication increases and creates the conditions where organizational structures need to move at that same pace to exchange new information. Our analysis also shows that inter-organizational coordination network structures are not fixed and vary in each period during a disaster depending on the needs. This may serve the basis for developing preparedness among agencies with an improved perspective for gaining effectiveness and efficiency in responding to natural disasters.