Individual and organizational conditions for the emergence and evolution of bandwagons

Abstract

What makes employees adopt a particular innovation, practice, or idea? And what makes it more likely for adoption to spread wide in an organization? This paper presents an agent-based model that simulates interactions among employees to analyze the spread of bandwagons. Agents are subject to conformity and peer pressure as well as to a two-level organizational hierarchy. In the model, perceptions of the surrounding environment depend on individual cognitive attitudes (or 'tolerance' to bandwagons), the level of ambiguity attached to social relationships, and organization size. Findings show that the probability of widespread diffusion (i.e., bandwagon) is dependent more on organizational size, conformity, and interactions than ambiguity and individual attitudes.

Inquisitiveness: distributing rational thinking

“…Instead, those with sodm i > µ sodm + 0.75 • σ sodm are particularly keen on using information from social channels (other agents in the system) to make decisions. This is in line with previous models of docility (Simon, 1993;Secchi and Bardone, 2009;Secchi and Gullekson, 2016), where individuals in a system have difference dispositions towards giving and taking information, recommendations, advice from others. And this is the function of the numerical value of sodm.…”

“…We performed several runs with a full factorial design with the parameters summarized in Table 1: 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 3 × 3 × 2 for a total of 288 configurations (the ‡ sign indicates values included in this first test). As indicated in a recent studies (Secchi and Seri, 2016;Seri and Secchi, 2017), power analysis is an efficient tool to estimate the number of runs a simulation should run (for applications, see Secchi and Gullekson, 2016;Radax and Rengs, 2010). An attempt to reach a power of 0.95 at the 0.01 significance level, and a conservative estimate of effect size, 0.1, resulted in approximately 30 runs per each simulation.…”

Are organisational defensive routines harmful to the relationship between personality and organisational learning?

“…An example of how interpretation of ideas, thinking, behaviour, practices, or processes occurs is given by studies of intra-organisational diffusion processes. These studies point out how organisational routines, culture, peer social identity, individual attitudes and cognition are particularly relevant for information interpretation to emerge (e.g., Fiol & O'Connor, 2003;Secchi & Gullekson, 2016). Intensity of social interaction between individuals and teams could improve understanding of new external knowledge (Jansen, Van Den Bosch, & Volberda, 2005).…”

The nature of management frameworks

“…A framework comes with benefits and drawbacks (Lambert et al, 2005). Because the alternatives, outcomes, and value of a framework are often not considered, the adoption of a framework requires scant effort and is easily facilitated (Secchi & Gullekson, 2015). The adoption of a management framework is not mainly determined by the rigor of developing frameworks (Iivari, 2007) but by other determinants, such as interorganizational memetic pressures that encourage managers to put a novel management framework into practice (Lawton & Wholey, 1993).…”

“…(Abrahamson & Rosenkopf, 1993) argue that such pressures occur when nonadopters would like to follow early adopters. Analysis of this phenomenon enables the identification of the conditions under which organizations can limit the rise of potential management fashions (Secchi, 2015). Moreover, research has shown that the adoption of a management novelty is usually decoupled from the potential adjustments that might have to be made by the organization that adopts a framework (Scarbrough & Swan, 2001).…”