Raymond E. Levitt

Interpersonal trust in cross-functional, geographically distributed work: A longitudinal study

With increasing globalization and the proliferation of communication technologies, more people are working in cross-functional, geographically distributed teams. Although trust is clearly an important ingredient in these collaborations, little is known about the challenges this new work and social environment creates for the development of trust. Different disciplinary perspectives, different regional or national cultures, and the lack of face-to-face interaction when working at a distance raise significant barriers to developing trust between distant co-workers. We, therefore, posit that traditional models of trust need to be adapted to describe the development of trust between cross-functional, geographically distributed partners. To test our hypotheses, we conducted a longitudinal study of architecture, engineering and construction management students engaged in designing and planning a

Innovation alignment and project network dynamics: An integrative model for change

5 million construction project in distributed teams. Our results suggest that cross-functional, geographically distributed workers may rely on early impressions of perceived trustworthiness when evaluating how their distant partners are delivering on commitments, because reliable information about actual follow-through is lacking or difficult to interpret. Consistent with this, we found that perceived trustworthiness, perceived follow-through and trust were relatively stable over time. We conclude that initial perceptions of trustworthiness are particularly important in cross-functional, geographically distributed work, although research is needed to draw comparisons with traditional work environments. # 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Organization and governance in construction

Innovation research has predominantly focused on hierarchically organized firms competing within single markets. Recently, however, researchers have debated over whether the increasing use of project networks within and across industries promotes or stifles innovation. This paper discusses a model based on cross-national diffusion data from three technological innovations in three-dimensional computer-aided design (3D CAD) and related implementation data from 82 firms. From the data we induce a set of constructs that form the basis of a two-stage model for understanding innovation in project networks. In the first stage of the model the alignment of an innovation to the existing allocation of work in a project network is ascertained. In the second stage, the implementation success and diffusion outcomes for innovations misaligned with the allocation of work are governed by the relational stability, accrual of interests, boundary permeability, and existence of an agent for project network change. In developing this integrative, two-stage model we resolve the contradiction in the academic literature regarding the degree to which project network dynamics can promote or stifle innovation.

OARPLAN: Generating project plans by reasoning about objects, actions and resources

Abstract Transaction cost analysis provides a viable theoretical perspective for the study of organization and governance in construction. The trilateral governance of a client, engineering consultant, and contractors commonly observed in industrial construction projects is detailed. The implications of a professional relationship between the client and the consultant and a clan-type relationship between the consultant and the contractors are discussed within the context of large construction projects.

Modeling and Analyzing Cultural Influences on Project Team Performance

This paper describes OARPLAN, a prototype planning system that generates construction project plans from a description of the objects that comprise the completed facility. OARPLAN is based upon the notion that activities in a project plan can be viewed as intersections of their constituents: objects, actions and resources . Planning knowledge in OARPLAN is represented as constraints based on activity constituents and their interrelationships; the planner functions as a constraint satisfaction engine that attempts to satisfy these constraints. The goal of the OARPLAN project is to develop a planning shell for construction projects that (i) provides a natural and powerful constraint language for expressing knowledge about construction planning, and (ii) generates a facility construction plan by satisfying constraints expressed in this language. To generate its construction plan, OARPLAN must be supplied with extensive knowledge about construction objects, actions and resources, and about spatial, topological, temporal and other relations that may exist between them. We suggest that much of the knowledge required to plan the construction of a given facility can be drawn directly from a three-dimensional CAD model of the facility, and from a variety of databases currently used in design and project management software. In the prototype OARPLAN system, facility data must be input directly as frames. However, we are collaborating with database researchers to develop intelligent interfaces to such sources of planning data, so that OARPLAN will eventually be able to send high level queries to an intelligent database access system without regard for the particular CAD system in which the project was designed. We begin by explaining why classical AI planners and domain specific expert system approaches are both inadequate for the task of generating construction project plans. We describe the activity representation developed in OARPLAN and demonstrate its use in producing a plan of about 50 activities for a steel-frame building, based on spatial and topological constraints that express structural support, weather protection and safety concerns in construction planning. We conclude with a discussion of the research issues raised by our experiments with OARPLAN to date.

Computational Modeling of Organizations Comes of Age

Research on international joint ventures (IJV) finds managers experience difficulties in working with cross-cultural teams. Our research aims to understand how cultural differences between Japanese and American firms in IJV projects effect team performance through computational experimentation. We characterize culture and cultural differences using two dimensions: practices and values.Practices refer to each culture’s typical organization style, such as centralization of authority, formalization of communication, and depth of organizational hierarchy. Values refer to workers’ preferences in making task execution and coordination decisions. These preferences drive specific micro-level behavior patterns for individual workers. Previous research has documented distinctive organization styles and micro-level behavior patterns for different nations. We use a computational experimental design that sets task complexityat four levels and team experience independently at three levels, yielding twelve organizational contexts. We then simulate the four possible combinations of USvs.Japanese organization style and individual behavior in each context to predict work volume,cost,schedule andprocess quality outcomes. Simulation results predict that: (1) both Japanese and American teams show better performance across all contexts when each works with its familiar organization style; (2) the Japanese organization style performs better under high task complexity, with low team experience; and (3) process quality risk is not significantly affected by organization styles. In addition, culturally driven behavior patterns have less impact on project outcomes than organization styles. Our simulation results are qualitatively consistent with both organizational and cultural contingency theory, and with limited observations of US-Japanese IJV project teams.

Toward a unified theory of project governance: economic, sociological and psychological supports for relational contracting

As they are maturing—i.e., as they are becoming validated, calibrated and refined—computational emulation models of organizations are evolving into: powerful new kinds of organizational design tools for predicting and mitigating organizational risks; and flexible new kinds of organizational theorem-provers for validating extant organization theory and developing new theory. Over the past 50 years, computational modeling and simulation have had enormous impacts on the rate of advancement of knowledge in fields like physics, chemistry and, more recently, biology; and their subsequent application has enabled whole new areas of engineering practice. In the same way, as our young discipline comes of age, computational organizational models are beginning to impact behavioral, organizational and economic science, and management consulting practice. This paper attempts to draw parallels between computational modeling in natural sciences and computational modeling of organizations as a contributor to both social science and management practice.To illustrate the lifecycle of a computational organizational model that is now relatively mature, this paper traces the evolution of the Virtual Design Team (VDT) computational modeling and simulation research project at Stanford University from its origins in 1988 to the present. It lays out the steps in the process of validating VDT as a “computational emulation” model of organizations to the point that VDT began to influence management practice and, subsequently, to advance organizational science. We discuss alternate research trajectories that can be taken by computational and mathematical modelers who prefer the typical natural science validation trajectory—i.e., who attempt to impact organizational science first and, perhaps subsequently, to impact management practice.The paper concludes with a discussion of the current state-of-the-art of computational modeling of organizations and some thoughts about where, and how rapidly, the field is headed.

Global projects : institutional and political challenges

Large, global, cross-sectoral, multi-phased civil infrastructure projects tend to be one-off projects for which transactions have no strong ‘shadow of the future’, but where elements of relational contracting are still ubiquitous. Such projects evolve through discrete phases—financial and technical feasibility, conceptual design, detailed design, construction, operations and renovation/replacement—each phase of which can be viewed as a discrete transaction during which key participants and stakeholders rotate in and out of the project. This discontinuity of participation across phases in the projects lifecycle creates a heretofore neglected contractual hazard of ‘displaced agency’. Similar governance challenges arising from displaced agency are found in long-lived aerospace and defence programmes, large-scale software initiatives and other sectors. We review, integrate, extend and apply economic, legal, sociological and psychological governance perspectives on relational contracts to address the extreme ...

A Trajectory for Validating Computational Emulation Models of Organizations

List of figures List of tables List of contributors Preface Ray E. Levitt and Ryan J. Orr Introduction W. Richard Scott Part I. Foundational Themes: 1. Global projects: distinguishing features, drivers, and challenges Ryan J. Orr, W. Richard Scott, Raymond E. Levitt, Karlos Artto and Jaakko Kujala 2. The institutional environment of global projects W. Richard Scott 3. Social movements and the growth in opposition to global projects Doug McAdam Part II. Institutional Differences and Global Projects: Empirical Studies: 4. Rules vs. results: sources and resolution of institutional conflicts on Indian Metro Railway projects Ashwin Mahalingam, Raymond E. Levitt and W. Richard Scott 5. Institutional exceptions on global projects: a process model Ryan J. Orr and W. Richard Scott 6. Local embeddedness of firms and strategies for dealing with uncertainty in global projects Ryan J. Orr and Raymond E. Levitt 7. Who needs to know what? Institutional knowledge and global projects Amy Javernick-Will and W. Richard Scott Part III. Political Conflicts and Global Projects: 8. Site fights: explaining opposition to oil and gas pipeline projects in the developing world Doug McAdam, Hilary Schaffer Boudet, Jenna Davis, Ryan J. Orr, W. Richard Scott and Raymond E. Levitt 9. To talk or to fight? Effects of strategic, cultural and institutional factors on renegotiation approaches in public-private concessions Henry Chan and Raymond E. Levitt Part IV. Governance Strategies and Structures: 10. Network-based strategies and competencies for political and social risk management Witold J. Henisz 11. Organizations enabling public-private partnerships: an organization field approach Stephen F. Jooste and W. Richard Scott References Index.

Agent-based modeling of knowledge dynamics

Validation of complex simulation models is a challenging problem in computational organization theory research. In this paper, we describe a validation strategy suitable for emulation simulation systems, and show how a comprehensive validation consists of a sequence of steps that evaluate different aspects of a computational organizational simulation model. We demonstrate how this strategy can be applied to the evaluation of the Virtual Team Alliance (VTA), an emulation simulation system designed to guide managers charged with organizational change. VTA required a &201C;trajectory&201D; of successive validation experiments, before managers where willing to follow the recommendations of VTA. Ultimately, we believe this validation approach can be applied to a wide range of different simulation systems, and will make identification of the strengths and weaknesses of organizational simulations easier.