The STAR System: A Unified Multi-Agent Simulation Model of Structure, Task, Agent, and Resource
Abstract
Managers are continually designing and redesigning their teams and organizations. Design decisions tend to be based on trial and error, with little attention to long term experience and little or no attempt at verification. Organizational researchers interested in design have generated a vast compendium of design knowledge, much of which goes under the heading - Contingency Theory. As the name implies, the right design for an organization is seen to be contingent on a large number of complex and interacting factors. The complexity of the findings is such that, on the practical side, little guidance can be given to the manager and, on the theoretical side, advances in understanding are hampered by the overwhelming complexity. Computational models are ideally suited for reasoning about large complex systems composed of multiple interacting parts. This thesis addresses these pragmatic and theoretical problems by developing a computational toolkit for reasoning about organizational design that can be used to design teams or organizations, examine the impact of design changes, and reason theoretically about organizational design. The proposed toolkit, referred to as the STAR (Structure, Task, Agent, Resource) system, integrates a set of building block modules into a flexible agent oriented framework that can be used to model and simulate organizations and evaluate alternative designs. The development of this toolkit will advance both our theoretical understanding of organizations and our methodologies for reasoning about, and evaluating different, designs. Using this toolkit I will demonstrate the utility of a new theoretical proposition, permeability, and the benefit of a new method for engineering organizational designs, organizational morphing.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Feb 24, 1999
- Accession Number
- ADA519430
Entities
People
- David J. Kaplan
Organizations
- Carnegie Mellon University