Monitoring the impact of norms upon organisational performance: A simulation approach

Abstract

Normative organisations use norms to guide and constrain agent behaviour in order to facilitate cooperation. Norms and their associated enforcement strategies are chosen to further organisational goals, but the effect that a norm has upon organisational performance may change over time in a dynamic environment and behaviour that is desirable in one environment may come to be harmful in another. In this paper we seek to answer the question - how can an organisation detect when a norm is no longer supporting its goals? Specifically, how can it monitor the impact of a norm upon its performance? This paper has three contributions: first, we detail a model which relates an organisation's norms to its performance, second, we propose a mechanism for monitoring the impact of a norm upon that performance using a simulation approach, and finally we describe an implementation of our mechanism. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.