Attitude change in arbitrarily large organizations

• Published in: Computational and mathematical organization theory 2014-09, Vol.20 (3), p.219-251
• Main Authors: Costa, Luis Almeida, de Matos, João Amaro
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Agency theory; Alignment; Artificial Intelligence; Attitude change; Attitudes; Business and Management; Communication channels; Contracts; Incentives; Individual behaviour; Individuals; Management; Mathematical analysis; Mathematical models; Methodology of the Social Sciences; Monitoring; Moral hazard; Operations Research/Decision Theory; Optimization; Organization theory; Organizational behaviour; Organizational structure; Organizations; Social psychology; Sociology; Studies
• ISSN: 1381-298X; 1572-9346
• DOI: 10.1007/s10588-013-9160-3

The alignment of collective goals and individual behavior has been extensively studied by economists under a principal-agent framework. Two main solutions have been presented: explicit incentive contracts and monitoring. These solutions correspond to changes in the objective situation faced by individuals. However, an extensive literature in social psychology provides evidence that behavior is influenced, not only by situational constraints, but also by attitudes. Therefore, an important aspect of organization is to choose the structures and procedures that best contribute to the dissemination of the desired attitudes throughout the organization. This paper studies how the initial configuration of attitudes and the size of the organization affect the optimal organizational structure and the timing of information flows when the objective is to align the members’ attitudes. We identify and characterize three factors that affect the optimal organizational structures and procedures and the degree of alignment of attitudes: (1) clustering effects; (2) member cross-influence effects; and (3) leader cross-influence effects.