Social Identity and Organizational Control: Results of an Agent-based Simulation

Abstract

It has long been recognised that the identification of organizational members with their organization could mitigate collective action problems. One domain in economics and management addressing these fundamental problems is organizational control, as it focuses on aligning individuals’ behavior with their or-ganization’s objectives. This paper studies organizational identification in interaction with major traits of the organizational context, including the principal means of organizational control. The study uses an agent-based simulation based on the framework NK fitness landscapes. In the model, individuals’ organizational identification emerges endogenously and causes certain effects in the organizations, which in turn induce feedback on identification. The model controls for different activation mechanisms for individuals’ organizational identity and for different organizational contexts in terms of task complexity and the prevailing coordination mecha-nism. The results suggest that the activation mechanisms subtly interfere with task complexity and organizational controls. Organizational identification was robustly beneficial across a wide range of task environments when the activation mode corresponds to organizational mission orientation and results controls. Moreover, organizational identification appears particularly relevant when the action controls grant some autonomy to subordinate decision-makers.