Managing Chaos and Complexity in Government: A New Paradigm for Managing Change, Innovation and Organizational Renewal

Kiel, L. Douglas

doi:10.2307/3380825

Cited by 22 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…NDS is a hybrid of mathematical concepts concerning attractors, bifurcations, structural stabilities and instabilities, chaos, fractals, catastrophes, self-organizing processes, cellular automata, genetic algorithms, and other evolutionary processes. NDS offers original explanations and insights for organizational phenomena (Dooley, 1997;Goldstein, 1994;Guastello, 1995;Kiel, 1994) and other topics in psychology (e.g., Abraham & Gilgen, 1995;Robertson & Combs, 1995;Sulis & Combs, 1996;Vallacher & Nowak, 1994). The principles most relevant to coordination games are considered here.…”

Section: Nonlinear Dynamics and Gamingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Origins of coordination and team effectiveness: A perspective from game theory and nonlinear dynamics.

Guastello¹,

Guastello²

1998

Journal of Applied Psychology

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Coordination occurs when 2 or more people do the same or complementary tasks at the same time; it takes several forms. The form of coordination studied here was similar to behavior at a 4-way stop traffic intersection. The performance task involved 12 4-person groups and a special card game. Split-plot analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that coordination rules were implicitly learned and then transferred successfully to new rules of similar difficulty and that coordination can occur without verbal mediation or leadership actions. Transfer of coordination was less positive to a task of greater difficulty. Nonlinear regression showed that fixed-point attractors could be extracted from all learning curves. The difficult shift contained a second chaotic process and a critical utility threshold at which the difficult rule could be mastered or not. Work-group effectiveness has been studied from a variety of perspectives; central themes have included cooperation, cohesion, incentives, task structure, size, and leadership attributes. In this project we focused on the dynamics of group coordination and traced its conceptual origins; here we report new theory, an experiment, and analytic techniques that explore the origins of coordination in groups. Coordination occurs when two or more people do the same or complementary tasks at the same time. Coordination is vital to group effectiveness in situations where a successful outcome for the entire group is the end result of numerous contributions or efforts by all group members and where successful contributions by one participant are contingent on a correct and timely contribution by another participant. Coordination among team members has been recognized as an important correlate of team performance

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Section: Nonlinear Dynamics and Gamingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Origins of coordination and team effectiveness: A perspective from game theory and nonlinear dynamics.

Guastello¹,

Guastello²

1998

Journal of Applied Psychology

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“…Resource dependency theory links organizations through the control, acquisition, and maintenance of resources (Evan, 1965, Pfeffer & Salancik, 2003 within a dynamic environment which affects the continual distribution and redistribution of resources (Kiel, 1994). Further, complexity suggests that partnerships and collaborations are natural adaptations to complex social and public policy problems just as organizations must adjust to their environment (Meier & O'Toole, 2003;Davis, Eisenhardt, & Bingham, 2007).…”

Section: Theoretical Underpinningsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Testing a Model of County Government Influence on Health Care Safety-Nets

Knepper

2012

Journal of Health and Human Services Administration

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In the United States, health care is not equitably distributed. As indicated in the literature, age, income, and other socio-economic indicators contribute to substantial differences in the variety and scope of health services. the 2010 Affordable Care Act illustrates the United States’ effort to bring balance and equity to the health care system. in the meantime, county governments are struggling with rising health care costs on their budgets (Eaton, 2009; Phaup, 2009; Clark, 2003), particularly health care for low-income residents (Benton, Byers, Cigler, Klase, Menzel, Salant, Streib, Svara, & Waugh, 2008). However, as learned in this study, county governments across the country continue to address the health care needs of uninsured and underinsured citizens through participation in health care safety nets. This research identifies possible county government influences on health care safety-nets. This study analyzed 123 responses from county government administrators and elected officials along with secondary data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the International City/County Manager Association using a variety of statistical techniques, culminating in structural equation modeling. These analyses provided reasonable explanation for the variation among the variables leading to network performance improvement in meeting the health care needs of uninsured and underinsured people as well as the significant influence of county government involvement.

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“…This point also reveals the multiple possibilities for applying ABM to human organizational environments. In organizational environments in which successful strategies must change to meet new circumstances (Kiel, 1994), ABM may serve as the laboratory platform that provides the dynamism essential to capturing organizational realities.…”

Section: Run Of Sugarscape Demonstrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The changing dynamic of chaos and complexity studies in the social realm have also presented new challenges for public administration researchers. While initial studies largely focused on chaos theory (Kiel, 1994), the current trend in this area of study is to view the complexity sciences as the fundamental building block for knowledge creation in public administration (Morcol and Dennard, 2000). Chaos theory is increasingly viewed as just one subset of the larger base of knowledge comprising the sciences of complexity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, few public administration scholars have produced sophisticated methodological examinations of either the nonlinear behavior (Kiel and Seldon, 1998) inherent in government work or of the structure of complex behavior in public administration phenomena (Comfort, 2000). This lack of the availability and application of sophisticated analytical methods have left most chaos and complexity research in public administration at the level of metaphor (see, for example, Kiel, 1994;Morcol and Dennard, 2000). While metaphor is a valuable means for learning and knowledge creation, the expansion of complexity studies into the mainstream of public administration research requires the use of tools and methods that meet the discipline's desire to produce research that both tests theory and builds theory with rigor and analytical support.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Primer for Agent-Based Modeling in Public Administration: Exploring Complexity in “Would-Be” Administrative Worlds

Kiel

2005

Public Administration Quarterly

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This paper explores the basic elements of Agent-Based Models and the implications of this simulation approach for public administration research. The general principles of agent-based modeling are examined with particular attention to the elements of simple rules and emergent behavior. Graphical representations from an agent-based model are provided. Issues of the appropriate application of agent-based modeling are presented. The notion of bureaucracy from the “bottom-up”, or generative public administration, is offered as a means for understanding how the actions of various heterogeneous agents may generate emergent structure and organization. Agent-based modeling provides a novel means for exploring complexity while adding considerable insight into assumptions of rationality and cooperation among human agents.

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Managing Chaos and Complexity in Government: A New Paradigm for Managing Change, Innovation and Organizational Renewal

Cited by 22 publications

References 0 publications

Origins of coordination and team effectiveness: A perspective from game theory and nonlinear dynamics.

Origins of coordination and team effectiveness: A perspective from game theory and nonlinear dynamics.

Testing a Model of County Government Influence on Health Care Safety-Nets

A Primer for Agent-Based Modeling in Public Administration: Exploring Complexity in “Would-Be” Administrative Worlds

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