| As the network organization proliferates over traditional hierarchical forms, the requirement to describe, estimate and predict the dynamic structure as well as the need to measure performance in network-organizations has become critical (Carley, 2002b; 2003). Traditional, static organizational line charts no longer produce viable explanations of organizational behavior. As a network, the members are constantly reorganizing to the environment and therefore are rapidly changing the organizational structure (Graham, Schneider, Gonzalez, 2004). These rapid shifts in organizational structure have implications for organizational performance and measurement. Measures of organizational performance include situation model (Entin & Entin, 1999), mental model congruence (Entin & Serfaty, 2000; Graham, Schneider, Bauer, Bessiere, & Gonzalez, 2004), transactive memory (Carley & Ren, 2001), shared mental model (Salas et al., 1995) and shared situation awareness (Endsley & Jones, 2001; 2002). Each of these measures have, as a common characteristic, the ability to describes how 'in-sync' the organizational membership is at a given point of time. Organizations operating in a fast-paced environment which are 'in-sync', tend to have higher levels of performance than those that are not (Salas et al., 1999; Arquilla & Ronfeldt, 2002). To understand and describe rapid network change in terms of Shared Situation Awareness, I use a combined approach consisting of experimentation and simulation. I conduct multiple, large-scale experiments on military command and control network-organization structure in a pseudo-laboratory environment. Using dynamic network analysis techniques, I identify and characterize the factors that contribute to the change in structure of the organization. Network change factors found significant are homophilly, physical distance, communication network distance, and organizational structure. These empirically based factors are instantiated in new implementation of the proximity matrix in the ORA & DyNet models (Carley et al., 2003). |
