Mind your mind: social influence on individual decision-making.

Humans are usually docile. Refraining from the common use of the word, I mean that, human’s decisions are generally based on information exchanged within a social system through suggestions, recommendations, comments, and advice. Herbert Simon called this human tendency to rely on socially obtained information (SOI) for decision-making as ‘docility’. There are occasions when humans tend to avoid using and interacting with the resources of the environment they are part of, making them mostly non-docile. Hence, docility becomes individuals’ dynamic behavioural and cognitive disposition which assists effective completion of cognitive tasks, specifically decision-making. This thesis is one of the very few attempts to investigate the concept of docility to provide it with some level of institutionalization as organizations should 1) understand and highlight value of docility, and 2) establish supporting mechanisms assisting emergence of docility. The thesis comprises of chapters addressing the challenges of understanding docility within organizational environment. Each chapter has its own focused research objectives responding to the main research questions. First, the thesis provides an in-depth review which unfolds key arguments and debates concerning the development of the concept of docility based on the theory of bounded rationality (BR) and distributed cognition mechanism. This study develops a theoretical framework to identify and explain the effect of docility on the psychology of individual’s feedback-seeking behaviour (FSB) using Big Five (BiG5) personality traits including extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience (OTE). The study follows Ashford and Cummings’ concept of FSB as a day to day proactive socialization tactic to gather informal and evaluative information about one’s role requirements and performance. The model proposes docility as a moderator of the relationship between BiG5 personality traits and FSB. Exploring these relationships is particularly important as there is a strive to uncover the antecedents of FSB as well as find the psychological, cognitive and organizational factors related to docility in a hope of promoting both at workplace. Second, followed by description on methodological aspects, the empirical findings of the study based off the proposed conceptual model are presented. Third, the study tests the model quantitatively through multiple regressions to analyse a sample of 408 observations gathered through online survey from UK based employees working in teams of different organizations. Results of this study indicate that a person’s FSB is partially attributable to his or her personality makeup. The research confirms that non- docile behaviour weakens the positive relationship between proactive traits ─ extraversion and OTE─ and FSB. Findings show conditional moderation effects of highly docile behaviour on relationships between FSB and conscientiousness as well as FSB and agreeableness. Neuroticism did not influence FSB. Research finds significant positive relationship between docility and FSB which brings a new perspective to the current literature on both concepts. The findings benefit practitioners by gaining some knowledge about i) employees’ preferable feedback-seeking strategy considering their average level of docility and personality, ii) ways to provide feedback, and iii) availability and allocation of resources to provide feedback. To find the effects of organizational characteristics — namely formal and informal rules of interaction, costs imposed on seeking and sharing information, and range of interaction— on different types of docility, this study uses agent-based modelling (ABM). This study takes Simon’s original model of docility, expands it, and applies it to individuals in formal and informal organizational environments. The reduced costs and flexible environment provided by high range of interactions are extremely significant in understanding how docility emerges and becomes a prevalent cognitive attitude. Finally, from an academic viewpoint, I contribute to debates surrounding concept of docility and exploring antecedents of FSB

On the quest for defining organisational plasticity: a community modelling experiment

Purpose: This viewpoint article is concerned with an attempt to advance organisational plasticity (OP) modelling concepts by using a novel community modelling framework (PhiloLab) from the social simulation community to drive the process of idea generation. In addition, the authors want to feed back their experience with PhiloLab as they believe that this way of idea generation could also be of interest to the wider evidence-based human resource management (EBHRM) community. Design/methodology/approach: The authors used some workshop sessions to brainstorm new conceptual ideas in a structured and efficient way with a multidisciplinary group of 14 (mainly academic) participants using PhiloLab. This is a tool from the social simulation community, which stimulates and formally supports discussions about philosophical questions of future societal models by means of developing conceptual agent-based simulation models. This was followed by an analysis of the qualitative data gathered during the PhiloLab sessions, feeding into the definition of a set of primary axioms of a plastic organisation. Findings: The PhiloLab experiment helped with defining a set of primary axioms of a plastic organisation, which are presented in this viewpoint article. The results indicated that the problem was rather complex, but it also showed good potential for an agent-based simulation model to tackle some of the key issues related to OP. The experiment also showed that PhiloLab was very useful in terms of knowledge and idea gathering. Originality/value: Through information gathering and open debates on how to create an agent-based simulation model of a plastic organisation, the authors could identify some of the characteristics of OP and start structuring some of the parameters for a computational simulation. With the outcome of the PhiloLab experiment, the authors are paving the way towards future exploratory computational simulation studies of OP