Cognitive attunement in the face of organizational plasticity
ISSN: 2049-3983
Article publication date: 13 July 2020
Issue publication date: 12 May 2021
Abstract
Purpose
The paper aims to use part of the distributed cognition literature to study how employees cope with organizational plasticity, in an attempt to identify the characteristics of cognitive plasticity.
Design/methodology/approach
Evidence is collected by designing and implementing an agent-based computational simulation model (the IOP 2.0) where employees have the option to use external resources and the social environment to perform tasks. As plasticity is more effective when change and uncertainty are high, the simulation features an increase in the difficulty and number of tasks to which employees need to cope.
Findings
Cooperation and sharing of competence and ability are key to cognitive plasticity. Being able to master the use of some resources, together with other employees’ competencies, make some achieve the most efficient task performance.
Practical implications
The findings suggest that under conditions of change and plasticity, human resource management (HRM) shall attempt to develop measures to support employees' cognitive skills necessary to cope with it, for example, mostly through diagnosis, training and facilitating on-the-job dialogue.
Originality/value
This is the first study that attempts a merger between organizational cognition and plasticity, and it is the first to match its results to HRM policy recommendations.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank all the participants of the Agent-Based Models of Organizational Behavior (ABMO3) workshop for useful feedback that helped me strengthen the model. I am grateful to two anonymous reviewers who provided extremely valuable suggestions on how to improve clarity and to build more consistent arguments. I would like to blame those who failed to find mistakes, weak arguments, and code breaks in the model but, if there are any of those, I am the only one responsible, unfortunately.
Citation
Secchi, D. (2021), "Cognitive attunement in the face of organizational plasticity", Evidence-based HRM, Vol. 9 No. 2, pp. 192-208. https://doi.org/10.1108/EBHRM-09-2019-0088
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited