The Effects of Disorganization on Goals and Problem Solving

Abstract

and sponsored by the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behavior (AISB). The event sought to examine the applications, structure, how-to, potentials, and philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of agent-based models (ABM) as they apply to organizational behavior and social agency. We had one day and a half of paper sessions, with social and networking activities. Participants came from seven countries, including the UK, .The workshop was extremely valuable and all who participated agreed that it delivered more than promised. We spent two interesting days sharing ideas, establishing fruitful research relationships, and learning a lot from each other. This was an attempt to see how ABM can be used to enhance social sciences and, in particular, the study of social agency and organizational behavior. The fruits of that workshop are now collected in this book. The discussions of the two days enabled true cross-disciplinary fertilization and inspired us to start and progress with the idea of this volume. We are extremely pleased that some of the spirit of those two days is now reflected into this book.Both editors of this volume share a keen interest in computational and mathematical simulation models. Martin is more experienced in ABM and comes from a more sociological background, while Davide came in contact with ABM simulation in 2010 and conducts his work on organizational behavior. Besides ABM and despite (or because) we come from different disciplinary backgrounds, we found ourselves very much aligned on two points, at least. First, we are both interested in understanding distributed cognitive processes and believe that ABM provides a very powerful frame to study them. Second, we both agree that cross-disciplinary efforts are extremely important for the advancement of science, despite contemporary academia does not seem to value or encourage them.A few words should be spent to describe the process we used to collect and edit this project. After the workshop, we invited participants to submit full papers based on their presentation. All presenters but two agreed to submit their work. We then v vi Preface

Team problem solving and motivation under disorganization – an agent-based modeling approach

“…Thus, these results corroborate the theoretical claims made by Abrahamson (2002) with respect, efficiency and effectiveness gains arising from disorder. These findings also mirror the findings of Abrahamson and Freedman (2006), Fioretti and Lomi (2008) and Herath et al (2016), extend them to the team level and lend further support to some of the benefits of disorganization discussed by researchers (i.e. access to more resources, greater stakeholder participation) (Freeland, 2002;Warglien and Masuch, 1996;Shenhav, 2002).…”

“…ABM has been used to model and simulate effects of disorganization in decision-making and found that "the 'disorganization' condition provides a better structural environment for employees to solve problems rather than under the 'organization' condition" (Herath et al, 2016, p. 77). The modeling rules used for the simulation presented in this paper build on the work of Herath et al (2016), Fioretti and Lomi (2008) and Lomi and Harrison (2012) and extend previous work to the team level.…”

Towards developing a measure of disorganization

“…The theory suggests disorganization yields better performance per worker but does not specify what tasks are involved in measuring the performance. Recent, simulation results (Herath et al, 2016(Herath et al, & 2017 show that there is a positive relationship between individual worker performance and disorganization (measures based on generic tasks). These simulation studies also show that disorganization seems to increase task performance while boosting both employee satisfaction and motivation.…”

Social services in post-industrial Europe: an incomplete success story and its tragic moments

“…Nowadays, in-house provision has often been outsourced, and interorganisational relations have become volatile. To be sure, service-based undertakings always need some 'non-organised' spaces for flexible problem-solving (Herath et al, 2016). Moreover, certain problematic elements of disorganisation (e.g.…”