Dynamics of organizational culture: Individual beliefs vs. social conformity

TL;DR

This paper presents an agent-based model to explore how individual beliefs and social conformity influence the evolution of organizational culture, revealing complex dynamics between perceived coherence and individual coherence levels.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, empirically-grounded agent-based model that incorporates social rank and belief networks, relaxing previous assumptions to better understand cultural dynamics.

Findings

Organizations can appear coherent while individuals are less so.

Social conformity components influence different levels of social aggregation.

Abstract

The complex nature of organizational culture challenges our ability to infers its underlying dynamics from observational studies. Recent computational studies have adopted a distinct 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 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.