Works
- Temporarily divide to conquer: centralized, decentralized, and reintegrated organizational approaches to exploration and adaptation, Organization Science 14(6), 650 to 669, 2003
- Balancing search and stability: interdependencies among elements of organizational design, Management Science 49(3), 290 to 311, 2003
In Organizational Structures
Known for
Activity systems and organizational search
Ideas
Temporarily divide to conquer. With Levinthal, Siggelkow showed in an agent-based simulation that when a firm's activities interact pervasively, neither a centralized nor a permanently decentralized structure performs well, and temporary decentralization followed by reintegration yields the highest long-term performance, at a short-run cost of decentralized exploration. Caveat: A simulation, read in its abstract only.
Balancing search and stability. With Rivkin, showed in an agent-based simulation that an organization must both search broadly for good sets of decisions and stabilize around good ones once found, so design elements that encourage broad search raise the marginal benefit of elements that give offsetting stability; the results put limits on the received wisdom that firm-wide incentives and capable subordinates make top-level oversight less valuable. Caveat: A simulation, read in its abstract only.
In this section, “read” means read by the Organizational Structures series: where a line says a work, or part of one, was not read, the series did not read it.