When three’s a crowd: how relational structure and social history shape organizational codes in triads

• Type of Material: Article
• Authors: Ozgecan Kocak, Emory University; Massimo Warglien, Università Ca’ Foscari
• Language: English
• Date: 2020-08-28
• Publisher: Organizational Design Community
• Publication Version: Final Published Version
• Copyright Statement: © The Author(s) 2020.
• License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Final Published Version (URL): http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s41469-020-00078-9
• Title of Journal or Parent Work: Journal of Organization Design
• Volume: 9
• Issue: 1
• Grant/Funding Information: M. Warglien was funded through the COPE program supported by a Sapere Aude grant from the Danish Research Council for Independent Research (FSE) and European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 732942.; The study was funded through TUBITAK (Program 1001, Project # 115K163). O. Kocak received support from TUBA (GEBIP-2014).
• Keywords: Experiment; Hierarchy; Conceptual pacts; Communication codes; Transitivity; Organizational structure; Triads; Coordination games; Acyclicity; Code convergence; Language; Common ground
• Research Categories: Sociology, Social Structure and Development; Business Administration, General; Business Administration, Management

Abstract

When members of an organization share communication codes, coordination across subunits is easier. But if groups interact separately, they will each develop a specialized code. This paper asks: Can organizations shape how people interact in order to create shared communication codes? What kinds of design interventions in communication structures and systems are useful? In laboratory experiments on triads composed of dyads that solve distributed coordination problems, we examine the effect of three factors: transparency of communication (versus privacy), role differentiation, and the subjects’ social history. We find that these factors impact the harmonization of dyadic codes into triadic codes, shaping the likelihood that groups develop group-level codes, converge on a single group-level code, and compress the group-level code into a single word. Groups with transparent communication develop more effective codes, while acyclic triads composed of strangers are more likely to use multiple dyadic codes, which are less efficient than group-level codes. Groups of strangers put into acyclic configurations appear to have more difficulty establishing “ground rules”—that is, the “behavioral common ground” necessary to navigate acyclic structures. These coordination problems are transient—groups of different structures end up with the same average communication performance if given sufficient time. However, lasting differences in the code that is generated remain.