EURO 2024 Copenhagen
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1948. Distributed Competence: How Team Structure Affects Task Performance

Invited abstract in session MA-43: Simulation of organizations I, stream Agent-based Models in Management, Economic and Organisation Sciences.

Monday, 8:30-10:00
Room: 99 (building: 306)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Martin Neumann
Language, culture and communication, University of Southern Denmark

Abstract

This paper is concerned with how different team structures affect task performance. By using a Case Study of the maintenance department of a large utility company as a starting point, the study creates an agent-based computational simulation model to compare four different structures: (a) strict hierarchy, (b) relaxed (or loose) hierarchy, (c) anarchy, and (d) hybrid (or baseline). The model is built by taking ethnographic observations from the Case Study to develop the basic layout for the model. The baseline case is the hybrid structure, from which the other structures have been created by reference to the literature. In accordance with the literature on distributed cognition in organizations, the main characteristic of the agents in the model is competence - i.e., their knowledge and practical expertise as they are functionally constituted in relation to their taking on of tasks as well as their subsequent completion. The simulation reveals that the effect of competence changes depending on the network of relations (relationship range in the model) among employees allowed by the team structure as well as according to cognitive dispositions (docility in the model). These findings indicate that, despite an overwhelming individualistic characterization of competence, a more accurate representation would be for it to be considered distributed rather than solely attributable to the individual.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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