Multilevel Organizational Adaptation: Scale Invariance in the Scottish Healthcare System

Brice Dattée () and James Barlow ()
Additional contact information
Brice Dattée: Department of Strategy and Organization, emlyon business school, 69134 Ecully, France
James Barlow: Imperial College Business School, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom

Organization Science, 2017, vol. 28, issue 2, 301-319

Abstract: We use the case of a “whole-system” change program in a national healthcare system to empirically examine the multilevel dynamics underlying organizational adaptation. Our analysis demonstrates how the cognitive distance between agents’ causal representations affects opportunities to cooperate in hierarchical systems. Using complexity theory, we identify a scale-invariant causal pathway that can be applied recursively across many organizational levels. At each level, three coupled feedback loops determine how local agents modify their cognitive representations to include uncovered interdependencies and synchronize their adaptive search across organizational boundaries: a “boundary work” loop, a “small wins” loop, and a “parochialism” loop. Our results also point to the scale-dependency of the strength of dissipative processes across levels. These novel results further develop the theory of organizational change and have practical implications for large multilevel organizations, especially regarding the sustainability of improvements.

Keywords: multilevel; organizational adaptation; cognitive representations; coupled learning; collaboration; complexity; scale invariance; healthcare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1113 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ororsc:v:28:y:2017:i:2:p:301-319

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Organization Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().