Multi-agent based simulation of organizational routines on complex networks

Organizational routines are collective phenomena involving multiple individual actors, and are crucial to understanding organizations behave and change in a certain period. In this paper, by regarding the individual habits of multiple actors involved in as fundamental building blocks, we consider organizational routines from an emergence based perspective. We emphasize the impacts of connections or network topologies among individual actors in the formation of organizational routines, and carry out a multi-agent based simulation analysis of organizational routines on complex networks. The results of our research show that connections or network topologies among individual actors do determine the dynamic characteristics of organizational routines, but are also influenced by two main factors, i.e., the capacity of memory about individual actors and the complexity of organizational tasks that individual actors should deal with repetitively. Although the total costs for individual actors to pay during their implementation of organizational tasks are variant, scale-free networks can always obtain a much higher level of the organizational routine, followed by both random and small-world networks. While regular lattices a relatively lower level.