A Model to Evaluate the Effect of Organizational Adaptation

  • Authors:

  • Holly A. H. Handley;Alexander H. Levis

  • Affiliations:

  • George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MSN 4D2, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA. hhandley@gmu.edu;George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MSN 4D2, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA. alevis@gmu.edu

  • Venue:
  • Computational & Mathematical Organization Theory
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

When an organization's output declines due to either internal changes or changes in its external environment, it needs to adapt. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of different adaptation strategies on organizational performance, an organizational model composed of individual models of a five stage interacting decision maker was designed using an object oriented design approach and implemented as a Colored Petri net. The concept of entropy is used to calculate the total activity value, a surrogate for decision maker workload, based on the functional partition and the adaptation strategy being implemented. The individual decision maker's total activity is monitored, as overloaded decision makers constrain organizational performance. A virtual experiment was conducted; organizations implementing local and global adaptation strategies were compared to a control organization with no adaptation. The level of tolerance of the organization, the workload limit based on the concept of the bounded rationality constraint, was used to determined when a decision maker was overloaded: the limiting effect of the workload on performance. The timeliness of the organization's response was used in order to evaluate organizational output as a function of adaptation strategy.