The impact of Team works and Knowledge Flows on Organizational Learning in response to an Innovative Environment: a modelling study

The aim of this paper is to investigate the link between the technology adoption decision taken by the manager and the technology implementation process within his team of workers. This objective gives rise to two different research questions. The first concerns the ways in which the organizational structure of the firm as well as its workers competences influence periodical technology choices made by the manager. The second question deals with the extent to which technological choices lead the manager to reorganize the firm's structure and the determination problem of the optimal organization of the firm. This paper addresses the case of a single firm facing an evolving environment outside its control. This approach does not imply that we neglect the idea that firms might contribute to environmental changes, but rather means that I do not focus on the microeconomics level regarding inter-firm interactions or interactions between firms and markets. Instead, the paper uses a management studies framework that takes account only of organisational decisions inside the firm. This view has implications for the theoretical outlook of the paper. On the one hand, it means that the standard microeconomics approach of the firm according to which managers always make rational choices based on optimality and short-term maximization, will not be adopted. The firm is not considered as an individual agent evolving in a more general framework concerned with optimal resource allocation at the level of the economy as a whole. Rather, it is considered as an organisation basing its development on the interactions between heterogeneous agents in their competences, beliefs and expectations. The assumption of bounded rationality and the definition of the firm as an organisation might suggest that we follow an evolutionary approach. This is not totally mistaken, but potentially misleading since adopting a management studies framework implies that, from the start, the analysis of the interactions between markets and the firm or the firms impact on the diffusion process of new technologies in the economy as a whole are being excluded. These issues are, however, central to the evolutionary approach of technological change. From this standpoint, the approach adopted in this paper excludes the feedbacks effects governed by the aggregate results of the technological choices made by firms on their future decisions. Finally, the extent to which firms react to environmental signals and the way they interact as suppliers or distributors with consumers will not be considered. This paper presents two main interests. On the one hand, it shows how to determine – in a simple but rigorous way – the direct and the feedback relations between technological change decisions made by managers and the importance of the diversity of organisational forms and competencies. On the other hand, the simplicity of the agent-based model gives the opportunity to extend it at different levels.