Multi-Agent Based Simulation of Organizational Routines on Complex Networks

Organizational routines are collective phenomena involving multiple individual actors. They are crucial in helping to understand how organizations behave and change in a certain period. In this paper, by regarding the individual habits of multiple actors involved as fundamental building blocks, we consider organizational routines from an ‘emergence-based’ perspective. We emphasise the impacts of connections or network topologies among individual actors in the formation of organizational routines, and carry out a multi-agent based simulation analysis of organizational routines on complex networks. We consider some important factors such as inertia resulted from individual memories, component complexity of organizational tasks, turnover of individual actors, the impacts of both heterogeneity and improvisation of individual actors involved, and the dynamical properties of the network topologies within which individual actors are located. The results of our research show that network topologies among individual actors do determine the dynamic characteristics of organizational routines. Although the fact is that the mechanisms beneath this are also influenced by some main factors like the memory capacity of individual actors and the component complexity of organizational tasks that these individual actors should deal with repetitively, and that the total costs for the organization to bear during their implementation of organizational tasks are variant, the routine system on scale-free networks can always have a better performance, and obtain a much higher coherency and routinization level of collective behaviours, even in the case of turnover of individual actors. In addition, when individual actors involved are heterogeneous, the routine system on scale-free networks would also exhibit a strong anti-disturbance ability, no matter whether there are minor improvisations from these individual actors or not. Nevertheless, a large number of improvisations enable individual actors to act in some more individualistic manners, and destroy the routine system as a result.