Abstract
At the end of the last century, chaos theory principles have helped organizational theorists to analyze several aspects of organizations and to account for their dynamic evolution. However, most of contributions remained relegated as qualitative discussions of organizational phenomena. In this paper, starting from effort allocations of subordinates in supervised work groups which were observed in a human participants interaction, we found evidence of nonlinear relation between the colleagues’ effort. In order to explain the large variability of behavior we observed, we consider those activated by unfavorable social comparison and propose a dynamical model. A theoretical dynamic model based on the empirical results appears to be powerful for modeling repeated interactions in a work group. Research and intervention design should focus on individual intolerance and beliefs about the reciprocal capacities between subordinates, which, according to our study, appear to play a key role in the inefficiency of equilibria observed in supervised work groups.
Highlights
In the 1990s, chaos theory was considered a promising framework to account for the dynamic evolution of industries and complex interactions among actors
Thiétart and Forgues (1995) argued that under some conditions organizations are likely to exhibit the qualitative properties of chaotic systems. This framework has been really fruitful: For instance, according to Vibert (2004), principles of chaos theory have helped organizational theorists to analyze several aspects of organizations; a list of “organizational propositions based on chaos and complexity theory” is provided in Houry (2012); small groups have been analyzed in terms of complex systems (Arrow et al 2000)
Due to the complexity of the system, both because of the human interaction component and the presence of several variables, we decomposed the problem in three steps: (1) Which are the important variables in the effort allocation problem? (2) what kind of relationship exists between the relevant variables? and (3) taking into account the previous finding, how may the system evolve? As finding data from controlled organizational interactions is difficult, we designed and ran an experiment to explore the complex relationship between the available information and the group performance
Summary
Thiétart and Forgues (1995) argued that under some conditions organizations are likely to exhibit the qualitative properties of chaotic systems This framework has been really fruitful: For instance, according to Vibert (2004), principles of chaos theory have helped organizational theorists to analyze several aspects of organizations; a list of “organizational propositions based on chaos and complexity theory” is provided in Houry (2012); small groups have been analyzed in terms of complex systems (Arrow et al 2000). For a recent review on teams considered as complex systems, the reader may refer to Ramos-Villagrasa et al (2018). This approach has provided insights into understanding dynamic complexity (Chia 1998; Griffin et al 1998), exploring nonlinear causality Flatau (1995). Another reason may be Thorngate (1976)’s “postulate of commensurate complexity,” i.e., the impossibility of a theory of social behavior to be simultaneously general, accurate, and simple, which has been explained by Weick (1979, p. 36) using the clock metaphor (Fig. 1)
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