Coordinating for Success: Trading Information Redundancy for Task Simplicity

The author examines whether the coordination scheme used in the organization, i.e. the level of redundancy in access to information and the organizational structure which defines who commands/communicates to whom, affects the organization's ability to learn and hence its ultimate performance. A model of organizational decision-making is presented where organizational performance is dependent on the combined decisions of the individual decision-makers, who base their decisions on their previous experience. Using simulation, the impact of organizational structure, information redundancy, and personnel turnover on organizational performance as the organization faces a sequence of similar but not identical problems is explored. This research suggests that increasing redundancy in information access does not necessarily compensate for personnel turnover, and may actually decrease the rate of organizational learning and degrade performance.