Normative Design of Project-Based Adaptive Organizations

Abstract

Over the past few years, mathematical and computational models of organizations have attracted a great deal of interest in various fields of scientific research (see Lin & Carley, 1993 for review). The mathematical models have focused on the problem of quantifying the structural (mis)match between organizations and their tasks. The notion of structural congruence has been generalized from the problem of optimizing distributed decision-making in structured decision networks (Pete, Pattipati, Levchuk, & Kleinman, 1998) to the multi-objective optimization problem of designing optimal organizational structures to complete a mission, while minimizing a set of criteria (Levchuk, Pattipati, Curry, & Shakeri, 1996, 1997, 1998). As computational models of decision-making in organizations began to emerge (see Carley & Svoboda, 1996; Carley, 1998; Vincke, 1992), the study of social networks (SSN) continued to focus on examining a network structure and its impact on individual, group, and organizational behavior (Wellman & Berkowitz, 1988). Most models, developed under the SSN, combined formal and informal structures when representing organizations as architectures (e.g., see Levitt et al., 1994; Carley & Svoboda, 1996). In addition, a large number of measures of structure and of the individual positions within the structure have been developed (Roberts, 1979; Scott, 1981; Wasserman & Faust, 1994; Wellman, 1991).

Citation

Levchuk, G., Serfaty, D. and Pattipati, K.R. (2006), "Normative Design of Project-Based Adaptive Organizations", Shawn Burke, C., Pierce, L.G. and Salas, E. (Ed.) Understanding Adaptability: A Prerequisite for Effective Performance within Complex Environments (Advances in Human Performance and Cognitive Engineering Research, Vol. 6), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 249-287. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1479-3601(05)06008-X