On Organizational Adaptation via Dynamic Process Selection

Abstract : Three different strategies are identified for organizational adaptation, including dynamic process selection. An executable organizational model composed of individual models of a five stage interacting decision maker is used to evaluate the effectiveness of the different adaptation strategies on organizational performance. The concept of entropy is used to calculate the total activity value, a surrogate for decision maker workload, based on the functional partition and the adaptation strategy being implemented. The individual decision makers total activity is monitored, as overloaded decision makers constrain organizational performance. A virtual experiment was conducted; organizations implementing local and global adaptation strategies were compared to a control organization with no adaptation. The level of tolerance of the organization, the workload limit based on the concept of the bounded rationality constraint, was used to determined when a decision maker was overloaded: the limiting effect of the workload on performance. The timeliness of the organizations response was used in order to evaluate organizational output as a function of adaptation strategy.