Abstract for: Structural - Cultural Alignment in Organizations A Systems Perspective

I explore the alignment between an organization's task environment, its structural features and the cultural traits of its members from a systems perspective. I model the alignment process as consisting of three forces: the task environment: organizations differ in the tasks that they confront, and tasks vary in their suitability to different structural approaches; top down organizational forces: leaders select and design structural features and processes that function effectively given tasks and organizational culture; and bottom up cultural forces: individuals adapt expectations, norms, and ways of interacting in response to structures, processes, and tasks. Using a common framework, I construct both mathematical and agent based models of alignment. The mathematical approach demonstrates how with representative agents such systems should settle into stable equilibria, that systems with positive feedbacks between structures and cultures support multiple equilibria, and that the concepts of equilibrium, alignment, and efficiency should be considered separately. I then build a series of illustrative agent based models that disentangles those contexts and shows how cultural forces slow adaptation when the task environment changes.