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Super-docility in organizations: an evolutionary model

Davide Secchi (Department of Management, University of Wisconsin, La Crosse (U.S.))
Emanuele Bardone (Department of Philosophy, University of Pavia, Italy (E.U.))

International Journal of Organization Theory & Behavior

ISSN: 1093-4537

Article publication date: 1 March 2009

98

Abstract

Herbert Simon introduced the term “docility” to define the tendency of human beings to get information from social channels. In this paper, we enrich this first definition with distributed cognition based arguments, and suggest that docile individuals modify the information they get, before passing it on to others. We present a simulation model of docile and non-docile individuals in organizations, where different docility attitudes (behaviors) are considered. In standard conditions, findings suggest that the above-average docile individuals remain below 20% of the number of workers in a given organization. This way, we outline potentials and limits of this intriguing concept.

Citation

Secchi, D. and Bardone, E. (2009), "Super-docility in organizations: an evolutionary model", International Journal of Organization Theory & Behavior, Vol. 12 No. 3, pp. 339-379. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOTB-12-03-2009-B001

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2009 by Pracademics Press

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