Maciej Workiewicz

Adaptive Capacity to Technological Change: A Microfoundational Theory of the Dynamics of Routines

We take a microfoundational approach to understanding the origin of heterogeneity in firms’ capacity to adapt to technological change. We develop a computational model of individual-level learning in an organizational setting characterized by interdependence and ambiguity. The model leads to organizational outcomes with the canonical properties of routines: constancy, efficacy, and organizational memory. At the same time, the process generating these outcomes also produces heterogeneity in firms’ adaptive capacity to different types of technological change. An implication is that exploration policy in the formative period of routine development can influence a firm’s capacity to adapt to change in maturity. This points to a host of strategic trade-offs, not only between performance and adaptive capacity, but also between adaptive capacities to different forms of change.

Are Two Heads Better than One: The Multi-Authority Form and Organizational Adaptation

The multi-authority form is a type of organization where subordinates report to multiple superiors and superiors share authority over their subordinates. While those forms are quite common among modern organizations, research on such forms offers conflicting findings. These conflicting findings, in turn, suggest the need for greater understanding of the mechanisms through which these complex hierarchies operate. We create an explicit agent-based model where organizational adaptation is guided by a coupled search, with superiors integrating efforts of interdependent organizational units and their subordinates pursuing specialization within those units. We identify the specific mechanisms which make the multi-authority form the preferred option when specialization and integration are both important. The traditional hierarchy is, in turn, shown to be superior at integrating interdependent units, but at a cost of local specialization.

When Two Bosses Are Better Than One: Nearly Decomposable Systems and Organizational Adaptation

Organizations, as is true with social systems more generally, tend to be nearly, not fully, decomposable. However, analyses of nearly decomposable systems have tended to be at a single level of analysis and have generally neglected the vertical element of nearly decomposable systems. Critical to the notion of nearly decomposable systems is the property that the details of a particular subproblem may be encapsulated and captured by more aggregate parameters and that those subproblems interact in an aggregate way. We explore these issues in reference to the role of three canonical organizational structures in facilitating adaptation in the presence of near decomposability: a traditional hierarchy in which a subordinate reports to a single boss, an autonomous form in which the subordinate does not have a direct reporting relationship, and a multiauthority structure in which the subordinate reports to multiple bosses. Despite the ubiquity and potential benefits of multiauthority structures in coordinating highly interdependent tasks, our understanding of the mechanisms that determine the performance of those structures is still relatively modest. Scholars have noted conflicting empirical findings and have called for a more rigorous approach to study these organizational forms. To help address these issues, we develop an agent-based computational model that compares the performance of these three canonical types of organizational forms in settings characterized by different degrees of complexity and near decomposability. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2017.1177 .

On the Foundations of Organizational Knowledge Interview With Professor Sidney G. Winter

This interview is focused on the core ideas of Sidney Winter’s work, with special emphasis on his contributions to the understanding of organizational knowledge and on synthesizing and situating those ideas in the broader context of management theory. We conducted the interview on November 6, 2011, during the Knowledge and Innovation Interest Group’s pre-conference program of the Strategic Management Society (SMS) annual conference in Miami.