Collective performance: modeling the interaction of habit-based actions

Michael Cohen, Daniel A. Levinthal and Massimo Warglien

Industrial and Corporate Change, 2014, vol. 23, issue 2, 329-360

Abstract: Recurring patterns of action are essential in our efforts to explain central properties of business firms and other organizations. However, the development of systematic theory has been hampered by the difficulty of adequately specifying foundational assumptions. We address this problem by defining a concept of collective performance, which brings together a range of recurring organizational action patterns that have been studied under labels such as "routine," "practice," standard operating procedure, or "genre of action." All these forms of organizational action are based on human habit to a significant degree. We propose a conceptual framework for such habit-based organizational action patterns. The framework is a set of core principles and desirable model properties that can serve as a guide in the development of formal models of collective performance. It provides micro-foundations for the modeling of collective performance that are aligned with contemporary developments in psychology. Finally, we present a series of examples, developed in Supplementary Materials, that shows how our framework leads to new classes of formal models that can aid the analysis of collective performance.

Date: 2014
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