Abstract

CASTRO ACEVEDO, Paula Sofía  and  BOHORQUEZ AREVALO, Luz Esperanza. SELF-ORGANIZED STRUCTURES, CONTROL HIERARCHY AND INFORMATION PROCESSING AGILITY. Dimens.empres. [online]. 2018, vol.16, n.1, pp.117-134. ISSN 1692-8563.  https://doi.org/10.15665/dem.v16i1.1483.

The hierarchical structure has been dominant in the business context because of the ease with which it exercises control and reduces the risks of the limited rationality of the individual. However, the precariousness of these structures in the processing of information has been evidenced, and by extension the difficulty to adapt to the change. These difficulties can lead organizations to business failure and chain effects that arise from it, for these reasons it is necessary to find alternative structural ways to overcome these problems. In this research, a literature review is made of the way in which the organizational structure is related to the performance of organizations from different theoretical perspectives. Subsequently, the failures of hierarchical control structures are identified, as the dominant structural form in the current economic system in terms of how they process information, learn and make decisions, and then contrast the way in which these characteristics are presented in systems self-organized natural and artificial. Because of the review of literature in natural and artificial self-organized systems, it was found that they are highly robust in the way they process information, since they manage to transform information from the environment into knowledge to make agile, fast and quality decisions. From this, it is necessary to transfer these properties of the self-organized systems to the business organizations by means of the design of structures that encourage self-organization to increase their performance and avoid the failure and chain effects that this causes. The implications of an organization of this type and the lines of research that originate from this work are also discussed.

Keywords : Self-organization; Organizational Structure; Information Processing.

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