Strategic Organizational Diagnosis and Design

Research on international joint ventures (IJV) finds managers experience difficulties in working with crosscultural teams. Our research aims to understand how cultural differences between Japanese and American firms in IJV projects effect team performance through computational experimentation. We characterize culture and cultural differences using two dimensions: practices and values. Practices refer to each culture's typical organization style, such as centralization of authority, formalization of communication, and depth of organizational hierarchy. Values refer to workers' preferences in making task execution and coordination decisions. These preferences drive specific micro-level behavior patterns for individual workers. Previous research has documented distinctive organization styles and micro-level behavior patterns for different nations. We use a computational experimental design that sets task complexity at four levels and team experience independently at three levels, yielding twelve organizational contexts. We then simulate the four possible combinations of US vs. Japanese organization style and individual behavior in each context to predict work volume, cost, schedule and process quality outcomes. Simulation results predict that: (1) both Japanese and American teams show better performance across all contexts when each works with its familiar organization style; (2) the Japanese organization style performs better under high task complexity, with low team experience; and (3) process quality risk is not significantly affected by organization styles. In addition, culturally driven behavior patterns have less impact on project outcomes than organization styles. Our simulation results are qualitatively consistent with both organizational and cultural contingency theory, and with limited observations of US-Japanese IJV project teams.

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Modeling and Analyzing Cultural Influences on Project Team Performance

Horii

Jin

Levitt

2005

“…The model described in the rest of this paper accurately mirrors the Burton and Obel (1998) prescription that highly political organizations can, on average, benefit more from central control. It also adds understanding of when and how other factors can combine to negate this effect.…”

Section: Multi-contingencymentioning

confidence: 87%

“…Burton and Obel (1998) proposed a "Multi-contingency" framework that summarized the works of different contingent design researchers into simple "if-then" rules and used an inference engine to combine the "then" parts of the rules that applied to a certain situation. This required strict and sometimes arbitrary definitions of terms such as "climate", "strategy" and "effectiveness", which, according Hirsch and Levin (1999), do not always mean the same thing to different people.…”

Section: Multi-contingencymentioning

confidence: 99%

When does management matter in a dog-eat-dog world: An “Interaction Value Analysis” model of organizational climate

Nasrallah

2006

Interaction Value Interaction Value Analysis (I.V.A.) models a network of rational actors who generate value by interacting with each other. This model can be used to understand human organizations. Since people form organizations to facilitate interactions between productive individuals, the value added by interaction is the contribution of the organization. This paper examines the result of varying the queuing discipline used in selecting among back-logged interaction requests. Previously developed I.V.A. models assumed a First-infirst-out (FIFO) discipline, but using other disciplines can better represent the "Climate" of an organization.I.V.A. identifies circumstances under which organizations that control members' interaction choices outperform organizations where individuals choose their own interaction partners. Management can be said to "matter" when individual choices converge to a point where interactions generate a lower than optimal value. In previous I.V.A. models, relinquishing central control of interaction choices reduced the aggregate value by anything from 0% to 12%, depending on circumstances. This paper finds the difference between the two modes of organization to go as high as 47% if actors display preferences between interaction partners instead of treating all equally. A politically divided, dog-eat-dog, "Capitalist" climate follows one queuing discipline, which is found to generally increase the value that a strong control structure can add. A chummy, in-bred "Fraternal" climate gains from control in some circumstances (low interdependence or low differentiation), but not in others (high or medium interdependence and differentiation under low diversity, for example). These are compared to the previous version of I.V.A., in which the queuing discipline was FIFO and the climate deemed "Disciplined". Previously published findings on Organizational Climate are duplicated and extended with a higher level of detail. Priority queuing in an I.V.A. model is thus a useful proxy for Organizational Climate, open to future validation because its detailed predictions can be confirmed or falsified by observation.

“…More recently, Burton and Obel (2003) have developed a multidimensional contingency approach that correlates organizational size, climate, strategy, technology, environment, and leadership preferences to organizational structure and design. They have operationalized their work with a rule based model driven by computer software called OrgCon R .…”

Section: Organizational Design Guidancementioning

confidence: 99%

A Dynamic Simulation Comparing Classical and Emergent-Network Models: Organizational Design Implications

Hill

Weistroffer

Aiken

2005

In the last decade, organizations have spent more on the creation, transformation, and communication of information than on the production of physical goods. The information age has been ushered in by the widespread assimilation of information and communication technologies. Many contemporary practitioners and organizational theorists predict the demise of the classical organizational design because of its inability to accommodate the sociological change engendered by the information age.The current study advances an emergent-network model of organizational design and compares it to the classical approach through a dynamic simulation of prototypical organizational activities. Organizational activities approximating one year were simulated in each of five organizations under constant baseline conditions and over one hundred experimental design conditions. The emergent network model manifested higher levels of goal attainment, resource utilization, and organizational capacity for accommodating change. These findings suggest that organizations will benefit from conformance to the design principals of the emergent-network model.