Organizational Morphing

Morphing is a relatively new concept to multi-agent organizational modeling. It can be viewed as a way to change the structural relationships between model components. Hence, morphing can be viewed as a way to realize that organizations change over time. With only two other research efforts on morphing in Computational Organization Theory (COT) (Perdu and Levis, 1998; Handley, 1999), little is known about how to do morphing.

The issue of organizational change is important to researchers and practitioners. It should appeal to both as a method to implement and study the changes that occur in organizations. These changes include promotion, communication, downsizing, reorganizing, and so forth. These real-world situations have rarely found their way into computational modeling. To the researcher, morphing may help focus efforts to study and understand change in organizations, both structural and permeable. Such efforts are crucial for the development of COT systems that can model real-world situations.

Morphing in the STAR system is based on a start and goal state, a set of generally feasible intermediate states (possibilities), and rules to transition from start, through feasible, to a goal state. A state is a snapshot of the organization in terms of structural relationships. States can be represented graphically or in matrix form. The sart and goal states specify what the organization looks like at the beginning and end of the organizational change. The possibilities states define what structural relationships can and cannot exist as the organization changes. The rules that govern the morphing process include replacing relationships, adding relationships, and deleting relationships.

Animated Demonstration

The animated demonstration shows an organization moving from a Hierarchical structure to a Ring structure. Both matrix and graphical representations are shown. The matrix is generated within STAR while the graphical representation was created outside of STAR. Arrows are highlighted in blue to indicate which relationship has changed.

The start state is Step 1. The goal state is Step 7. Hence, steps 2 through 6 are generated by STAR using its organizational morphing tool.