Research On The Design Of Project-based Organization Based On The Integrated Simulation

Project-based organization (PBO) is a management pattern that all the activities are organised with the project and the value is created by the project so that the organization achieves the stragetic goals. However, for improving the performance of project, people have been paying more attention to the production function of project while neglecting the organizational design for a long time. Taking the case of construction project-based organization, this paper abstracts the attributes of PBO and studies how to design PBO based on various perspectives. The main works are summarized as the following aspects:Firstly, the stakeholders taking part in the project form a virtual organization together called macro-PBO. Based on the principal-agent theory and social exchange theory, how to design the contract or inter-organization relationship of macro-PBO is studied from the perspectives of dynamic system and bounded rationality of people. In this paper, an integrated simulation model is developed, in which principal-agent theory and social psychology theory are integrated into the agent-based model and develop a simulation system. The study results indicate nearly all the agents of macro-PBO would not like to risk making the net loss, and fairness has an important influence on both agent and principal. Therefore the contract should be designed according to the above conclusions ensuring all the actors of the macro-PBO share the common objectives.Secondly, based on the resource-dependence theory and contextuality within the organizational design dimensions system, contextual design between size, formality, authority pattern of desion-making and incentive is vestigated for micro-PBO, according to the inter-organization relationships and the changing environment. The integrated simulation model is developed, in which the NK model is combined with complementarity framework. With the simulation model, we study how the capability of resource gaining of micro-PBO and changing environment impact on the contextuality of the organizational design dimensions of micro-PBO. The research shows that the common wisdoms about the contextuality are not suitable for the micro-PBO living the present Chinese environment. However these common wisdoms are still valuable for future development of Chinese micro-PBO.Thirdly, based on the organization theory, we study how to conduct contextual design about organizational design demensions, namely functional hierarchy, horizontal communication structure, authority distribution pattern, incentive, capability of information process and communication efficiency between staffs. We model the task or product formally, and develop an agent-based model to combine the micro-PBO with the task. Through simulation experiments, how the organization and task interact on each other is researched.Then we generalize the framework about how to design inner formal dimensions of micro-PBO according to various tasks.Lastly, based on theory of organization and organization learning, we research on the design of organization cultures and structure has the features of non-formal communication system. Using the empirical research, we study the relation between cultures and the individual desire about knowledge transfer. And we use various virtual networks to indicate various organization structure of PBO. We integrate the empirical research and social network analysis to simulate the interactions between the cultures of PBO and the organization structure. The results show the distributed authority and symmetrical structure are the facilitators to organization learning, and the cultures and structure of PBO depend upon each other indicating that the informal team building is meaningful only the staffs of PBO share the common culture fully.In this study, we firstly review the organizational design and PBO research status. Then we introduce the principles and approaches of PBO in my study. Next we apply the integrated simulation approaches proposed by this study in organizational design of PBO from various perspectives. We draw some conclusions making good complement to existing theory and practice.