Super-docility in organizations: an evolutionary model

Abstract

Herbert Simon introduced the term “docility” to define the tendency of human beings to get information from social channels. In this paper, we enrich this first definition with distributed cognition based arguments, and suggest that docile individuals modify the information they get, before passing it on to others. We present a simulation model of docile and non-docile individuals in organizations, where different docility attitudes (behaviors) are considered. In standard conditions, findings suggest that the above-average docile individuals remain below 20% of the number of workers in a given organization. This way, we outline potentials and limits of this intriguing concept.

The Cognitive Side of Social Responsibility

“…Since docility describes a learning activity that involves pro-social behavior (Secchi, 2007b), it might be interesting to see if it relates to creativity too. A recent study on human behavior in organizations suggests that individuals showing the highest levels of docility cover the most creative roles in the organization and show good attitudes toward leadership (Secchi and Bardone, 2009). …”

Individual and organizational conditions for the emergence and evolution of bandwagons

“…When the attitude towards docility is particularly low-meaning it is mostly passive-, there may be that individuals are only passively getting information from social channels and their decision making remains somehow mechanical (March 1978(March , 1994Miller et al 2012). We are postulating that this characteristic of the individual (i.e., docility) varies in its intensity (Thomsen 2015) depending on contextual and internal elements and it assumes high or low values (Secchi 2015a;Secchi and Bardone 2009). Low docility is mostly characterized by passive attitudes rather than interaction and exchange of information-i.e., a mix of passive and active-because this is a so-called survival condition, where someone needs information from others to make his/her way in the organization.…”

“…As docility levels rise, we can observe more interaction and a sort of ''giving back.'' The more value the individual provides to others when giving back information-i.e., active docility-the higher the standards of the interactions (Secchi and Bardone 2009). …”

“…However, we implemented this mechanism in the model (see Eqs. 1 and 2 below) to mimic a passive attitude towards gathering information more than re-distributing it (Secchi and Bardone 2009;Secchi 2011). The lower the value of k is, the more likely it is that agents take whatever is coming from the environment and align to it, thus increasing the probability of joining the bandwagon.…”

“…In the model, this is mild cultural conformity. In short, it seems that more active (Bardone 2011) and ''intelligent'' (Simon 1993) distributed cognitive processes are successful when there is a feeling of belongingness and a community to which employees can identify with (Secchi and Bardone 2009). This element needs to be investigated further however, we have isolated some of the aspects that characterized more clearly what is this ''mindlessness'' that previous works on the bandwagon refer to (Fiol and O'Connor 2003;Secchi and Bardone 2013).…”