Promoters versus Adversaries of Change: Agent-Based Modeling of Organizational Conflict in Co-Evolving Networks

The social adoption of change is usually hard because in reality, forces opposing the social adoption of change manifest. This situation of organizational conflict corresponds to the case where two competing groups of influential agents (“promoters” versus “adversaries” of change) operate concurrently within the same organizational network. We model and explore the co-evolution of interpersonal ties and attitudes in the presence of conflict, taking into account explicitly the microscopic “agent-to-agent” interactions. In this perspective, we propose a new ties-attitudes co-evolution model where the diffusion of attitudes depends on the weights and the evolution of weights is formulated as a “learning mechanism” (weight updates depend on the previous values of both weights and attitudes). As a result, the co-evolution is intrinsic/endogenous. We simulate representative scenarios of conflict in 4 real organizational networks. In order to formulate structural balance in directed networks, we extended Heider’s definition of balance considering directed triangles. The evolution of balance involves two stages: first, negative links pop up disorderly and destroy balance, but after some time, as new negative links are formed, a “new” balance is re-established. This “new” balance is emerging concurrently with the polarization of attitudes or domination of one attitude. Moreover, same-minded agents are positively linked and different-minded agents are negatively-linked. This macroscopic self-organization of the system is due only to agent-to-agent interactions, involving feedbacks on weight updates at the local microscopic level.