Promoters versus Adversaries of Change: Agent-Based Modeling of Organizational Conflict in Co-Evolving Networks

Abstract

The social adoption of change is usually hard because in reality, forces opposing the social adoption of change manifest. This situation of organizational conflict corresponds to the case where two competing groups of influential agents (“promoters” versus “adversaries” of change) operate concurrently within the same organizational network. We model and explore the co-evolution of interpersonal ties and attitudes in the presence of conflict, taking into account explicitly the microscopic “agent-to-agent” interactions. In this perspective, we propose a new ties-attitudes co-evolution model where the diffusion of attitudes depends on the weights and the evolution of weights is formulated as a “learning mechanism” (weight updates depend on the previous values of both weights and attitudes). As a result, the co-evolution is intrinsic/endogenous. We simulate representative scenarios of conflict in 4 real organizational networks. In order to formulate structural balance in directed networks, we extended Heider’s definition of balance considering directed triangles. The evolution of balance involves two stages: first, negative links pop up disorderly and destroy balance, but after some time, as new negative links are formed, a “new” balance is re-established. This “new” balance is emerging concurrently with the polarization of attitudes or domination of one attitude. Moreover, same-minded agents are positively linked and different-minded agents are negatively-linked. This macroscopic self-organization of the system is due only to agent-to-agent interactions, involving feedbacks on weight updates at the local microscopic level.

Dynamics of Social Influence and Knowledge in Networks: Sociophysics Models and Applications in Social Trading, Behavioral Finance and Business

“…The reputation difference r j (t) − r i (t) is analogous to the opinion difference found in (3), used in the original HK model and other non-linear models. However, contrary to the original HK model, network structure evolves due to the presence of a co-evolution mechanism [78][79][80]. Specifically, the reputation of an agent increases due to wealth accumulation.…”

“…The presence of a co-evolution mechanism between structure and agents' attributes, indicating a continuous micro-macro interaction, has been already highlighted in certain studies [76,77,79,107,116]. Nevertheless, further exploration would be more than welcome in order to more accurately describe various co-evolutionary processes of social diffusion.…”

“…This key observation distinguishes the classically defined diffusion equation describing spontaneous diffusion between "mindless" molecules of matter from social interactions between intelligent agents. Taking this key observation into account, the impact of prioritization of actions and awareness level has been extensively discussed in [105][106][107] for KD and in [56,79] for OD.…”