Dynamics of organizational culture: Individual beliefs vs. social conformity

Christos Ellinas, Neil Allan and Anders Johansson

PLOS ONE, 2017, vol. 12, issue 6, 1-20

Abstract: The complex nature of organizational culture challenges our ability to infer its underlying dynamics from observational studies. Recent computational studies have adopted a distinctly different view, where plausible mechanisms are proposed to describe a wide range of social phenomena, including the onset and evolution of organizational culture. In this spirit, this work introduces an empirically-grounded, agent-based model which relaxes a set of assumptions that describes past work–(a) omittance of an individual’s strive for achieving cognitive coherence; (b) limited integration of important contextual factors—by utilizing networks of beliefs and incorporating social rank into the dynamics. As a result, we illustrate that: (i) an organization may appear to be increasingly coherent in terms of its organizational culture, yet be composed of individuals with reduced levels of coherence; (ii) the components of social conformity—peer-pressure and social rank—are influential at different aggregation levels.

Date: 2017
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0180193

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0180193

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