The emergence of organizational routines from habitual behaviours of multiple actors: an agent-based simulation study

Abstract

Organizational routines are generative, dynamic systems involving multiple actors, and are crucial to understanding how organizations typically accomplish their tasks. In this paper, by regarding the individual habits of multiple actors as fundamental building blocks, we investigate organizational routines through a 'bottom-up' approach. On the basis of an individual actor-based perspective, we provide a general framework for analysing the internal structures of organizational routines and carry out agent-based simulation analysis based on a special empirical background. The results of our research show that performance feedback loops underlying interactions between actants, including both human actors and non-human artefacts, are key factors underpinning the formation and dynamics of organizational routines, and that imitation by individual actors may accelerate the emerging processes of these routines. For routines deliberately designed by management, an extended model from the perspective of evolution games indicates that a better balance of payoffs between different individual actors is important, and that the initial strategic distributions of individual actors are sensitive to the formation of routines. Agent-based simulation and evolutionary game theory thus provide quantitative but effective approaches that allow us to open up the 'black box' of organizational routines in two completely distinct forms-those that emerge from repeated interaction between individual actors and those deliberately designed by management--and to explore their formation and micro-dynamics.

Rituals and routines

“…Part of the history of the concept of routines will be to choose between: populations of firms undergoing selective market pressures, with routines as fundamental units of transmission and variation (Hodgson and Knudsen, 2004); and sequences of actions that reproduce on the terrain of the organization with varying success, the fundamental units being cognitive-symbolic codes, action schemes, habits, memes, etc. (Weeks and Galunic, 2003; Pentland et al , 2012; Gao et al , 2014). …”

“…sequences of actions that reproduce on the terrain of the organization with varying success, the fundamental units being cognitive-symbolic codes, action schemes, habits, memes, etc. (Weeks and Galunic, 2003; Pentland et al , 2012; Gao et al , 2014).…”

Routines: towards the Complexity of Organizational Intentionality

“…In the context of automaticity-related views, this take brought substantial disagreement concerning the nature of routines. 1 Another noticeable theme is the problem of how routines emerge from other organizational phenomena or from various micro-level factors which frequently require special approaches to organizational intentionality and cognition-action links (Dittrich and Seidl 2018;Gao et al 2014;Bapuji et al 2012;Witt 2011).…”

Routines: towards the complexity of organizational intentionality

“…Another noticeable theme is the problem of how routines emerge from other organizational phenomena or from various micro-level factors which frequently require special approaches to organizational intentionality and cognition-action links (Dittrich and Seidl 2018;Gao et al 2014;Bapuji et al 2012;Witt 2011).…”