Simulation Of Organizational Adaptation To Structural Change

The description and implementation of a model for the study and simulation of adaptive organizations subject to structural change, under the modeling method based on multi-agent systems, is presented. This model is built in NetLogo, and has similarities, but also differences, with previously models developed by the authors, and Kathleen Carley models (some of them published in the journal CMOT: Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory). A series of experiments to examine the adaptive behavior of the organization were carried out, by varying factors related to structural change in organizations, or affecting the attitude and skills of the members of the organization. The following factors of the agents of the organization were varied: the form how information for decision-making is obtained, the memory capability, and the attitude to share information with each other. From these experiments the following results with respect to organizational behavior were found: a) Cooperation (good attitude) of the agents is vital to achieve the good performance of the organization; b) the way in which the agents seek information (passive, active, or learning using endorsements) is essential to achieve organizational efficiency; c) increase in the agents' memory is not always an advantage, as traditionally expected. The model has a wide range of variables with which a social researcher can experiment in order to conduct the study of the behavior of a specific organization.