Simulating Project Work Processes and Organizations: Toward a Micro-Contingency Theory of Organizational Design

Raymond E. Levitt, Jan Thomsen, Tore R. Christiansen, John C. Kunz, Yan Jin and Clifford Nass
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Raymond E. Levitt: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Center for Integrated Facility Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-4020
Jan Thomsen: Det Norske Veritas, Veritasveien 1, N-1322 Hovik, Norway
Tore R. Christiansen: Det Norske Veritas, Veritasveien 1, N-1322 Hovik, Norway
John C. Kunz: Center for Integrated Facility Engineering, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-4020
Yan Jin: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Southern California, Denney Research Building, #10, Los Angeles, California 90089-1111
Clifford Nass: Department of Communications, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305-2050

Management Science, 1999, vol. 45, issue 11, 1479-1495

Abstract: The Virtual Design Team (VDT) extends and operationalizes Galbraith's (1973) information-processing view of organizations. VDT simulates the micro-level information processing, communication, and coordination behavior of participants in a project organization and predicts several measures of participant and project-level performance. VDT-1 (Cohen 1991) and VDT-2 (Christiansen 1993) modeled project organizations containing actors with perfectly congruent goals engaged in complex but routine engineering design work within static organization structures. VDT-3 extends the VDT-2 work process representation to include measures of activity flexibility, complexity, uncertainty, and interdependence strength. It explicitly models the effects of goal incongruency between agents on their information processing and communication behavior while executing more flexible tasks. These extensions allow VDT to model more flexible organizations executing less routine work processes. VDT thus bridges rigorously between cognitive and social psychological micro-organization theory and sociological and economic macro-organization theory for project teams. VDT-3 has been used to model and simulate the design of two major subsystems of a complex satellite launch vehicle. This case study provides initial evidence that the micro-contingency theory embodied in VDT-3 can be used to predict organizational breakdowns, and to evaluate alternative organizational changes to mitigate identified risks. VDT thus supports true "organizational engineering" for project teams.

Keywords: agency theory; concurrent engineering; coordination theory; contingency theory; goal incongruency; interdependence; project management; project organizations; computational organizational design; information processing; new product development; organization design; professionals; semiroutine tasks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (31)

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