Simulating Project Work Processes and Organizations: Toward a Micro-Contingency Theory of Organizational Design

• Authors: Raymond E. Levitt;Jan Thomsen;Tore R. Christiansen;John C. Kunz;Yan Jin;Clifford Nass
• Venue: Management Science
• Year: 1999

The Virtual Design Team (VDT) extends and operationalizes Galbraith's (1973) information-processing view of organizations. VDT simulates the micro-level information processing, communication, and coordination behavior of participants in a project organization and predicts several measures of participant and project-level performance. VDT-1 (Cohen 1991) and VDT-2 (Christiansen 1993) modeled project organizations containing actors with perfectly congruent goals engaged in complex but routine engineering design work within static organization structures. VDT-3 extends the VDT-2 work process representation to include measures of activity flexibility, complexity, uncertainty, and interdependence strength. It explicitly models the effects of goal incongruency between agents on their information processing and communication behavior while executing more flexible tasks. These extensions allow VDT to model more flexible organizations executing less routine work processes. VDT thus bridges rigorously between cognitive and social psychological microorganization theory and sociological and economic macro-organization theory for project teams. VDT-3 has been used to model and simulate the design of two major subsystems of a complex satellite launch vehicle. This case study provides initial evidence that the microcontingency theory embodied in VDT-3 can be used to predict organizational breakdowns, and to evaluate alternative organizational changes to mitigate identified risks. VDT thus supports true "organizational engineering" for project teams.