Dynamics of organizational culture: Individual beliefs vs. social conformity

Authored by Anders Johansson, Christos Ellinas, Neil Allan

Date Published: 2017

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.018019

Sponsors: United Kingdom Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)

Platforms: No platforms listed

Model Documentation: Other Narrative Mathematical description

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

The complex nature of organizational culture challenges our ability to infer its underlying dynamics from observational studies. Recent computational studies have adopted a distinctly different view, where plausible mechanisms are proposed to describe a wide range of social phenomena, including the onset and evolution of organizational culture. In this spirit, this work introduces an empirically-grounded, agent-based model which relaxes a set of assumptions that describes past work-(a) omittance of an individual's strive for achieving cognitive coherence; (b) limited integration of important contextual factors-by utilizing networks of beliefs and incorporating social rank into the dynamics. As a result, we illustrate that: (i) an organization may appear to be increasingly coherent in terms of its organizational culture, yet be composed of individuals with reduced levels of coherence; (ii) the components of social conformity D peer-pressure and social rank D are influential at different aggregation levels.

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Cooperation networks Model Power time Science Balance