A Proposal for Dealing with Micro-political Process Weakness for Corporate Business based on Software Agents

摘要

In this paper, we propose a way to study the weaknesses for corporate bureaucracy - which can lead to bankruptcy - based on agent-based modeling. Bureaucracy is defined as the administration of government through departments and subdivisions managed by sets of appointed officials following an inflexible routine. "Ideally", the constituent members are loyal to the corporation, and they are able to control their personal feelings. However, unfortunately, in real world organizations this assumption is not always true. Personal feelings are taking into account during the execution of authority, to get some personal benefits e.g. get promotions, better salaries, and so on. This is one weakness of the organization, which in the worst case can lead the corporation to bankruptcy. In this paper, we analyze through agent-based modeling, a real case of a Japanese bank, which went to bankruptcy due to the organizational weakness, in order to study the process. Our software agents are characterized by taking into account the limitations in memory and processing ability I.e. the bounded rationality to model the actors in the organization, under the conditions of searching for satisfactory solutions instead of the best solution. Our aim is twofold: (a) to understand the micro-political process weakness, that have destructed a real-world organization, and (b) based on this understanding, to propose a means to analyze through simulations and provide support to overcome such real-world organizational weaknesses.