Super-Docility in Organizations: An Evolutionary Model

Evolutionary game theory typically focuses on actions but ignores motives. Here, we introduce a model that takes into account the motive behind the action. A crucial question is why do we trust people more who cooperate without calculating the costs? We propose a game theory model to explain this phenomenon. One player has the option to “look” at the costs of cooperation, and the other player chooses whether to continue the interaction. If it is occasionally very costly for player 1 to cooperate, but defection is harmful for player 2, then cooperation without looking is a subgame perfect equilibrium. This behavior also emerges in population-based processes of learning or evolution. Our theory illuminates a number of key phenomena of human interactions: authentic altruism, why people cooperate intuitively, one-shot cooperation, why friends do not keep track of favors, why we admire principled people, Kant’s second formulation of the Categorical Imperative, taboos, and love.

Organizations are composed of stable, predominantly cooperative interactions or n-person exchanges. Humans have been engaging in n-person exchanges for a great enough period of evolutionary time that we appear to have evolved a distinct constellation of species-typical mechanisms specialized to solve the adaptive problems posed by this form of social interaction. These mechanisms appear to have been evolutionarily elaborated out of the cognitive infrastructure that initially evolved for dyadic exchange. Key adaptive problems that these mechanisms are designed to solve include coordination among individuals, and defense against exploitation by free riders. Multi-individual cooperation could not have been maintained over evolutionary time if free riders reliably benefited more than contributors to collective enterprises, and so outcompeted them. As a result, humans evolved mechanisms that implement an aversion to exploitation by free riding, and a strategy of conditional cooperation, supplemented by punitive sentiment towards free riders. Because of the design of these mechanisms, how free riding is treated is a central determinant of the survival and health of cooperative organizations. The mapping of the evolved psychology of n-party exchange cooperation may contribute to the construction of a principled theoretical foundation for the understanding of human behavior in organizations.

Purpose -This paper aims to address the nature of docility in organizations, its practical role in attention scarcity and knowledge diffusion in complex organizations and the management implications for organizational learning and innovation to improve knowledge management. Design/methodology/approach -This paper examines knowledge organizations from the perspective of human resource strategies, their role in information abundance and attention scarcity and techniques to enhance docility mechanisms at different levels of the organization to increase innovation and performance. Findings -This paper, in reviewing the organization literature on attention scarcity, addresses the shortage of studies linking the need for docility -the desire to learn from workers and the desire to teach -in personnel practices of knowledge firms, where intense social interaction, social feedback and social learning are the norms. Practical implications -Knowledge management -scanning, creation, coordination, interpreting, transfer and integration -may well be the basis of competitive advantage, based on human resource strategies to mobilize explicit and tacit knowledge via docility mechanisms, including mentoring, teamwork, coaching and deep collaboration. Originality/value -Decades ago, Herbert A. Simon introduced this new concept, docility, which is now central to knowledge organizations that face information abundance and attention scarcity. Knowledge organizations require tools of docility to align human resource strategies to both strategic management and operational functions to enhance teaching and learning in design structures that are time-constrained.

PsycEXTRA Dataset, 2000

We present a theory of perceived politeness and its sociological functions derived from the work of and then extend that theory toward a cognitive model of politeness and its effects on human decision making. We then report the results of an experiment in which participants' directive compliance behaviors and attitudes are examined under conditions varying the amount of politeness or rudeness used and the power or familiarity relationship between the participant and the directive giver. Results show significant impacts of politeness on a variety of directive compliance behaviors, and show accuracy for predicting the relationship of Social Distance on perceived politeness and directive compliance. Predictions about the role of Power relationships were generally not as effective.

Organisations can manage knowledge resources more effectively only if employees are willing to share their knowledge with colleagues (Amayah, 2013). This article makes two contributions. First, there is little research on costly signaling theory explaining the behaviours of people related to interpersonal communication and knowledge sharing. Second, this study extends the literature on the factors that affect informal knowledge sharing. The desire to send out signals is considered as a viable factor or enabler affecting the propensity of employees to share their knowledge. Costly Signaling Theory (CST) is a branch of evolutionary biology. It examines communication among individuals. The central question is when organisms with conflicting interests should be expected to communicate honestly (no presumption being made of conscious intention) rather than cheating. This paper‟s main thesis is that, as in the case of animals, the behavior of humans in organisations, specifically their willingness to share knowledge, can be explained by means of the costly signaling theory. To better understand the possible application of CST into knowledge management theory, this paper offers a brief review of literature on the sharing of knowledge and interpersonal communication in organisations. The paper also includes a proposed research design for the purpose of testing the CST in knowledge management (KM) applications.

2020

WHO COOPERATES AND WHY? AN INVESTIGATION OF THE ROLES OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES AND REPUTATION IN COOPERATION Amanda Rotella Advisor: University of Guelph, 2019 Dr. Pat Barclay In this doctoral dissertation, I apply evolutionary and ecological theories to investigate psychological mechanisms that influence cooperative behaviour. Additionally, I investigate how individual differences in prosociality influence these mechanisms, and what contributes to the development of these individual differences in prosociality. I emphasize the role of reputational consequences (i.e., in fitness costs/benefits), and how trade-offs in costs/benefits vary depending on individual differences. I also investigate the underlying trade-offs that contribute to how individual differences in prosociality are developed. In chapters 1 and 2, I investigate how individual differences in prosociality relate to responsivity to moral licensing and cleansing effects (Chapter 1), and the watching eyes effect (Chapter...

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2015

We experimentally study ways in which the social preferences of individuals and groups a¤ect performance when faced with relative incentives. We also identify the mediating role that communication and leadership play in generating these e¤ects. We …nd other-regarding workers tend to depress e¤orts by 15% on average. However, sel…sh workers are nearly three times more likely to lead workers to coordinate on minimal e¤orts when communication is possible. Hence, the other-regarding composition of a team of workers has complex consequences for organizational performance.

Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences, 2011

Managers could more effectively promote cooperation within their organizations if they had greater understanding of how evolution designed people to cooperate. Here we present a theory of group cooperation -the Adaptationist Theory of Cooperation in Groups (ATCG) -that is primarily an effort to pull together the scattered findings of a large number of evolution-minded researchers, and to integrate these findings into a single coherent theory. We present ATCG in three main sections: first, we discuss the basic premise that group cooperation evolved because it allowed individuals to acquire personal fitness benefits from acting in synergy with others; second, we examine the cooperative strategy that most often prevails in successful groups, "reciprocal altruism", and the free rider problem that constantly threatens it; and third, we explore how cooperative behavior is affected by differences (a) among individuals, (b) between the sexes, and (c) among different kinds of resources that a group may share. Throughout all of these sections, we suggest ways in which ATCG's predictions could be usefully applied in real organizations. We conclude that while ATCG is consistent in some regards with existing theories from organizational behaviour, its individual-level adaptationist perspective allows it to make a variety of novel predictions.

Social Science Research Network, 2010

Gossip in the workplace has generally been ignored by researchers and often criticized by practitioners. The authors apply a transdisciplinary evolutionary approach to argue that gossip is a natural part of social organizations and that certain conditions can encourage socially-redeeming gossip. They draw on case studies involving cattle ranchers, members of a competitive rowing team, and airline company employees to juxtapose the nature and functions of gossip across a wide set of communities. They find that workplace gossip can serve positive functions when organizational rewards-measured in contextspecific currencies-are fairly allocated at the level of small-scale groups rather than the level of individuals within groups. Given the diversity of their case studies, the authors are able to identify financial and nonfinancial rewards that facilitate group-serving gossip in different environments. Their findings make sense in light of an evolutionary perspective that recognizes similarities between the range of environments in which humans have primarily evolved and the workplace conditions that invite socially-redeeming gossip.

Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making, 2012

This article reports an experiment in which college students and professional combat air controllers performed a simulated team interaction task designed to explore the effects of the degree of politeness used by a directive giver and the degree of "social distance" (roughly, team affiliation and affinity between the directive giver and the recipient), on directive compliance behaviors and attitudes. The design and experimental approach was informed by the functional theory of politeness in social interactions developed by Brown and Levinson, although hypotheses are advanced that extend this essentially perceptual model to effects on behaviors and attitudes. Results showed that increased politeness in a directive significantly improved attitudes toward the directive giver. Social "nearness" operated similarly and influenced the degree of politeness perceived even when the request itself was unchanged. Both effects operate similarly for novices and experts. Compliance rates (and one portion of reaction time) were similarly affected by the politeness of the directive giver but, interestingly, were affected differently for novices and experts. The politeness of the directive giver increased compliance for novices but decreased it for experts. This result suggests that politeness perceptions are an important influence on work performance but that their interpretation can be influenced through training and/or work "culture. "