Organization's Changes Through its Lifecycle; A System Dynamics Approach

摘要

Many scholars have used organizational life cycle theory to explain development in organizations. Each has considered stages of organizational development from a specific perspective by unique sets of organizational characteristics. For example, Queen (1983) focused on changes in organizational structure or Mintzberg (1984) emphasized on Power perspective. So in most of the models, only some attributes are discussed to be able to cope with the complexity of change. As a result, the relationship between these attributes is not vividly discussed.In this paper, we tried to extract some of the key attributes of organizations which cause the change from the literature and concentrated on the relationship between them. Resting on this approach, we were able to look at organizational change as a continuous process which is caused by the mutual relationship between different attributes. After recognizing the feedback loops that shape the behavior of organizations through their life cycle, we simulated it with system dynamics tools. Since in different situations and presumption organizations may encounter with different barriers to growth, which are referred as crises, we developed our model for different scenarios. This way, it is possible to view the dynamics of organization's changes in its lifecycle.