Simulating project work processes and organizations: Toward a micro-contingency theory of organizational design

The Virtual Design Team (VDT) extends and operationalizes Galbraith's (1973 ) information-processing view of organizations. VDT simulates the micro-lev el information processing, communication, and coordination behavior of part icipants in a project organization and predicts several measures of partici pant and project-level performance. VDT-1 (Cohen 1991) and VDT-2 (Christian sen 1993) modeled project organizations containing actors with perfectly co ngruent goals engaged in complex but routine engineering design work within static organization structures. VDT-S extends the VDT-2 work process repre sentation to include measures of activity flexibility, complexity, uncertai nty, and interdependence strength. It explicitly models the effects of goal incongruency between agents on their information processing and communicat ion behavior while executing more flexible tasks. These extensions allow VD T to model more flexible organizations executing less routine work processe s. VDT thus bridges rigorously between cognitive and social psychological m icro-organization theory and sociological and economic macro-organization t heory for project teams. VDT-3 has been used to model and simulate the desi gn of two major subsystems of a complex satellite launch vehicle. This case study provides initial evidence that the micro-contingency theory embodied in VDT-5 can be used to predict organizational breakdowns, and to evaluate alternative organizational changes to mitigate identified risks. VDT thus supports true "organizational engineering" for project teams.