Identifying the Impact of Artifacts-Based Exploration and Exploitation on Routines’ Formation Dynamics: An Agent-Based Model

Organizational routines are at the core in capturing the typical way of how organizations accomplish their tasks. This paper primarily summarizes the development of scholars’ understanding of the crucial role that artifacts and the materiality play during the course of routines. We then focus on the material artifacts-based exploration and exploitation carried out by multiple human actors, and create a link between individual situated actions at the micro-level and the collective outcome as patterned routines. This discloses the underlying logic between human actors’ exploration and exploitation of material artifacts on the one hand, and the ‘(re)framing-overflowing’ interaction loop amidst routine performances and artifacts as artifactual representations (D’Adderio, 2008; 2011) on the other. Subsequently, this study used an agent-based approach to formalize routines formation dynamics from the ‘bottom-up’. Our simulation results highlighted the relationships between the three crucial aspects – which include the interdependences between situated-actions within and between organizational tasks, artifacts-based explorative and exploitative activities carried out by multiple human actors, and organizational structures or the power asymmetry characterizing interpersonal relationships within the routine system. The research work theoretically enriches people’s understanding of routines formation dynamics over time, and provides indications for managers in designing routine performances via the artifacts.