Modeling Human and Organizational Behavior Application to Military Simulations (1998) / Chapter Skim
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10 Modeling of Behavior at the Unit Level
10 Modeling of Behavior at the Unit Level
Pages 269-300
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From page 269... ...
Among the factors at the unit level are the number of opportunities for the organization to review its decision within the abbreviated decision period (Cohen, 1988) , the type and appropriateness of the training provided to the decision makers (Duffy et al., 1988)
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From page 270... ...
We might characterize such C3 models as social agent models in which there are multiple agents connected by one or more networks. Such computational models of organizational units have a large number of potential uses in military settings.
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From page 271... ...
However, since the C3 architecture itself can affect performance in complex and nonlinear ways that vary by task, having a computational module that alters organizational unit behavior based on the C3 architecture could increase the validity of these models. The expanded individual models are simulation models of individual agents in which each agent has, as part of its knowledge base, some organizational unit
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Within this larger context, a third type of organizational unit-level model also exists the social agent model. These are simulation models of organizational units as collections of multiple agents engaged in performing a distributed task.
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From page 273... ...
Second, the behavior of organizational units appears to be more than a simple sum of the parts. Rather, the behavior of the organizational unit is often strongly determined by the ongoing pattern of interactions among the agents, the norms and procedures governing group interaction, and legal and institutional constraints beyond the control of any one agent.
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From page 274... ...
Finally, there is a disjunction between the current state of knowledge of unit-level and individuallevel behavior. A fair amount is known about how organizational units influence the information to which individual agents have access.
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From page 275... ...
These models are particularly useful for demonstrating the necessity, inadequacy, or insufficiency of specific claims about how organizational units behave and the relative impact of different types of policies or technologies on that behavior. Additionally, these models are useful for contrasting the relative behavior of different organizational units.
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From page 276... ...
definition of the task-based knowledge associated with different roles in the authority structure, and (3) modeling of the process whereby command relationships are restructured as various organizational units become incapacitated.
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From page 277... ...
Because of the complexity and nonlinearity of the behavior of these factors, as well as their interaction, structural factors should not be represented by simply "adding on" unit-level "rules." Moreover, much of the work on organizations suggests that structural and cultural factors with cognitive and task factors are a dominant constraint on human behavior. Rather than being emergent, organizational units are often put in place deliberately to achieve certain goals (Etzioni,1964~; for example, joint task forces are assembled, almost on the fly, to meet specific military objectives such as securing a particular port or rescuing a group of civilians.
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From page 278... ...
The ability to measure, and thus monitor, changes in the C3 architecture makes it possible to validate and use models to conduct "what if" analyses about the impact of new policies, procedures, and technologies. Three common approaches are used to represent the C3 architecture in models that examine the behavior and decision making of organizational units: the rule-based approach, the network approach, and the petri net approach.
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From page 279... ...
First, the representation facilitates the measurement of many factors that influence organizational unit behavior, such as throughput, breaks in communication, structural redundancy, and workload assignment errors (see, for example, Krackhardt, 1994, and Pete et al., 1993, 1994~. Second, having commanders or team members specify the structure often helps them identify specific problems in the C3 architecture.
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From page 280... ...
Most statistical tools for determining whether two things are statistically different are applicable only to variable data for which one can easily calculate the mean and standard deviation. For organizational units, the data involved are often network level.
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From page 281... ...
uses a simulated annealing technique to draw networks with minimal line overlap based on a routine developed by Eades and Harel (1989~. If this work is to have value in partitioning C3 architectures at the organizational unit level, several additional factors will need to be considered, including partitioning of weighted networks, partitioning of networks with colored nodes (multiple types of nodes)
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From page 282... ...
. A third challenge is the building of models of actual organizational units that can adapt their architectures on the basis of what is possible rather than what is optimal.
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From page 283... ...
Decades of research indicate that these factors interact in complex and nonlinear ways in affecting organizational unit-level performance. The performance of opposing forces will vary if their agents are trained in different ways, exist within different C3 structures, or are subject to different levels of stress.
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. Moreover, for planning and analysis purposes, there is a need to be able to forecast how organizational units are likely to change given various triggering events (such as resource destruction)
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For example, organizational units faced with stress often cope by becoming more rigid, which in some cases means becoming more hierarchical. These learning models can be used to estimate when such rigidity is likely to pay off and what factors in the C3 architecture might inhibit that response.
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From page 286... ...
Rather, the value of these learning algorithms in modeling organizational unit-level behavior may lie in the extent to which the procedure they use to alter the organizational unit's C3 structure matches the procedure used by chief executive officers and the extent to which they can be adjusted to capture the constraints on changing the C3 structure that are present in actual military organizational units. At the organizational unit level, then, basic research on constraint-based adaptation procedures is needed.
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From page 287... ...
Research conducted to date suggests that organizational units can prepare themselves to learn novel ideas and ways of doing work by acquiring the right mix of personnel, engaging in research and development, and being flexible enough to reassign personnel and reengineer tasks. · In many cases, organizational units can substitute real-time coordination for an established C3 structure (Hutchins, 1990~.
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However, in actual organizational units, many different types of learning are employed simultaneously. Most of the research using these techniques has assumed that the environment (the landscape)
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From page 289... ...
. Other work demonstrates that the cognitive capabilities of the individual agents, as well as their level and type of training, interact with the C3 structure and the task the agents are performing to such an extent that different types of agent models may be sufficient for modeling organizational unit-level response to different types of tasks (Carley and Newell, 1994; Carley and Prietula, 1994~.
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From page 290... ...
In very small organizational units, this range may be so small for some metrics that those metrics have no value in predicting performance outcomes, whereas for large organizational units, these metrics may be the critical ones for predicting performance. Consequently, different measures of C3 structure may be needed at different scales.
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From page 291... ...
(For example, see the task analysis done for the VDT by Levitt et al., 1994, and Cohen, 1992, or applications involving petri nets in Remy and Levis, 1988~. There has been and continues to be a great deal of research in sociology, organizational theory, and management science on how to do a task analysis at the organizational unit level.
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From page 292... ...
Ease of Modeling Organizational Units One of the main problems in rapidly building organizational unit-level models is that the available languages do not have a set of primitives geared to the organizational unit level. Thus, each researcher implementing an organizational unit-level model creates his/her own tools for modeling a variety of organizational unit-level behaviors, such as moving personnel between divisions, promoting personnel, measuring performance, combining decisions, and communicating commands.
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From page 293... ...
For example, researchers in distributed artificial intelligence rediscovered the well-known result from organizational theory that there is no one right organizational design for all tasks. Likewise, social scientists rediscovered the well-known result from computational analysis that performance improvements in neural net-like models require a huge number of training trials.
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From page 294... ...
SDML (Moss and Edmonds, 1997; Edmonds et al., 1996; Moss and Kuznetsova, 1996) is a multiagent object-oriented language for modeling organizational units.
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Within SDML, the structure of the multiagent system is represented as a container hierarchy, such that agents may be contained within small organizational units that are contained within larger organizational units. Containers and their associated agents are linked by an inheritance hierarchy.
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. Within ORGAHEAD, organizational units have the capability of adapting their C3 structure dynamically over time in response to environmental changes.
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From page 297... ...
extending current models to new tasks; (2) creating teams of military and civilian research personnel to extend existing models to a C3 model that could be used in some specific military setting, such as synthetic theater of war-Europe (STOW-E)
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From page 298... ...
Finally, work is needed on expanding existing models and validating them against data on actual organizational units. To represent organizational unit behavior accurately, models of unit-level learning should not only learn to make the correct decision, but also mislearn under certain circumstances to better represent real human behavior.
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From page 299... ...
Progress on individual-level models was facilitated by the development of platforms, such as Soar, that integrate various aspects of human cognition and/or physiology. At the unit level, one of the most pressing issues is that development of unit-level models is extremely time-consuming, and each modeler spends part of his or her time reinventing basic procedures, such as communication protocols and algorithms for traversing the command structure.
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From page 300... ...
However, learning at the unit level may interfere with or be aided by learning at the individual level. For example, unit-level learning in corporations is frequently embedded in the connections among personnel and the roles the personnel play, but the value of such learning is often negated when personnel are replaced or the organization downsizes.
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