Relating Structure and Dynamics in Organisation Models

Abstract

To understand how an organisational structure relates to dynamics is an interesting fundamental challenge in the area of social modelling. Specifications of organisational structure usually have a diagrammatic form that abstracts from more detailed dynamics. Dynamic properties of agent systems, on the other hand, are often specified in the form of a set of logical formulae in some temporal language. This paper addresses the question how these two perspectives can be combined in one framework. It is shown how for different aggregation levels within an organisation structure, sets of dynamic properties can be specified. Organisational structure provides a structure of interlevel relationships between these multiple sets of dynamic properties. Thus organisational structure relates to specification of the dynamics of organisational behaviour. As an illustration, for Ferber and Gutknecht's AGR organisation modelling approach it is shown how a foundation can be obtained for integrated specification of both structure and dynamic properties of an organisation.

A generic architecture for redesign of organizations triggered by changing environmental circumstances

“…An organizational structure has the aim to keep the overall dynamics of the organization manageable; therefore the structural relations between the different elements within the organizational structure have to impose relationships or dependencies between their dynamics; cf. [18]. In the introduction to their book Lomi and Larsen [20] emphasize the importance of such relationships:…”

“…An important issue is how organizational structure (the design object description determined in DODM) relates to (mathematically defined) relationships between these sets of dynamic properties for the different elements and aggregation levels within an organization (cf. [18]). Preferably such relations between sets of dynamic properties would be of a logical nature; this would allow the use of logical methods to analyze, verify and validate organization behavior in relation to organization structure.…”

“…Preferably such relations between sets of dynamic properties would be of a logical nature; this would allow the use of logical methods to analyze, verify and validate organization behavior in relation to organization structure. Indeed, following [18], in the approach presented below, logical relationships between sets of dynamic properties of elements in an organization turn out an adequate manner to (mathematically) express such dynamic cross-element or cross-level relationships.…”

“…It is possible that each level shown in the tree (for example organization properties) again consists of multiple levels. The logical relationships put forward above can be formalized further as shown in [18]. Figure 7 shows an example of a hierarchy of dynamic properties for an organization producing certain products, the properties follow field observations at the Ford Motor Company in 1980 described in [25].…”

“…[5,10,11,14,18]) are used as the objects to be designed, and for the requirements of these models formalizations of organizational behavior are used (see e.g. [10,11,14,18]). The whole design process has been formalized by means of a temporal logical language (cf.…”