Computational Design and Analysis of Multinational Organizations: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Findings about Culture-Performance Link in Heterogeneous Coalition Organizations

This work aims to set up an analytical framework that supports the design of multinational organizations based on cultural constraints. Besides serving as a design aid, the analytical framework enables one to test hypotheses related to the effects of cultural heterogeneity on organizational outcome. Throughout this study, the heterogeneous coalition organization design problem has been formulated as a Multi-level Distributed Intelligence System in which decision making nodes are culturally uniform sub-groups. A bottom-up design methodology has been developed that exploits results from Lattice Theory, and applies a new concept named group-organization fit. A case study is used (1) to illustrate the use of the methodology to design and evaluate coalition alternatives, and (2) to analyze the effects of different types and degrees of heterogeneity on the performance of coalition organizations. The approach enables the inclusion of group-level discriminating attributes such as national culture into the design of organizational architectures and introduces the possibility of using this type of information to design more fit coalition organizations.