Dynamics of organizational culture: Individual beliefs vs. social conformity

The complex nature of organizational culture challenges our ability to infers its underlying dynamics from observational studies. Recent computational studies have adopted a distinct different view, where plausible mechanisms are proposed to describe a wide range of social phenomena, including the onset and evolution of organizational culture. In this spirit, this work introduces an empirically-grounded, agent-based model which relaxes a set of assumptions that describes past work - (a) omittance of an individual's strive for achieving cognitive coherence, (b) limited integration of important contextual factors - by utilizing networks of beliefs and incorporating social rank into the dynamics. As a result, we illustrate that: (i) an organization may appear to be increasingly coherent in terms of organizational culture, yet be composed of individuals with reduced levels of coherence, (ii) the components of social conformity - peer-pressure and social rank - are influential at different aggregation levels.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figure

Uncovering the fragility of large-scale engineering project networks

Engineering projects are notoriously hard to complete on-time, with project delays often theorised to propagate across interdependent activities. Here, we use a novel dataset consisting of activity networks from 14 diverse, large-scale engineering projects to uncover network properties that impact timely project completion. We provide the first empirical evidence of the infectious nature of activity deviations, where perturbations in the delivery of a single activity can impact up to 4 activities downstream, leading to large perturbation cascades. We further show that perturbation clustering significantly affects project overall delays. Finally, we find that poorly performing projects have their highest perturbations in high reach nodes, which can lead to largest cascades, while well performing projects have perturbations in low reach nodes, resulting in localised cascades. Altogether, these findings pave the way for a network-science framework that can materially enhance the delivery of large-scale engineering projects.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, 7 supplementary figure

Modelling indirect interactions during failure spreading in a project activity network

Spreading broadly refers to the notion of an entity propagating throughout a networked system via its interacting components. Evidence of its ubiquity and severity can be seen in a range of phenomena, from disease epidemics to financial systemic risk. In order to understand the dynamics of these critical phenomena, computational models map the probability of propagation as a function of direct exposure, typically in the form of pairwise interactions between components. By doing so, the important role of indirect interactions remains unexplored. In response, we develop a simple model that accounts for the effect of both direct and subsequent exposure, which we deploy in the novel context of failure propagation within a real-world engineering project. We show that subsequent exposure has a significant effect in key aspects, including the: (a) final spreading event size, (b) propagation rate, and (c) spreading event structure. In addition, we demonstrate the existence of hidden influentials in large-scale spreading events, and evaluate the role of direct and subsequent exposure in their emergence. Given the evidence of the importance of subsequent exposure, our findings offer new insight on particular aspects that need to be included when modelling network dynamics in general, and spreading processes specifically.Comment: l5 pages, 7 Figures, Submitte

Evaluating the role of risk networks on risk identification, classification and emergence

Modern society heavily relies on strongly connected, socio-technical systems. As a result, distinct risks threatening the operation of individual systems can no longer be treated in isolation. Consequently, risk experts are actively seeking for ways to relax the risk independence assumption that undermines typical risk management models. Prominent work has advocated the use of risk networks as a way forward. Yet, the inevitable biases introduced during the generation of these survey-based risk networks limit our ability to examine their topology, and in turn challenge the utility of the very notion of a risk network. To alleviate these concerns, we proposed an alternative methodology for generating weighted risk networks. We subsequently applied this methodology to an empirical dataset of financial data. This paper reports our findings on the study of the topology of the resulting risk network. We observed a modular topology, and reasoned on its use as a robust risk classification framework. Using these modules, we highlight a tendency of specialization during the risk identification process, with some firms being solely focused on a subset of the available risk classes. Finally, we considered the independent and systemic impact of some risks and attributed possible mismatches to their emerging nature.Comment: 21 pages, 7 Figures, 4 tables, To appear in Journal of Network Theory in Financ