Environmental determination or organizational design: An exploration of organizational decision making under environmental uncertainty

The relationship between the environment and organizational designs has been a main focus for the past several decades, often with different and even opposing views. Through a computer simulation model, this study attempts to provide a coherent framework by exploring how environmental uncertainty affects organizational decision making performance in an open systems setting where organizations can have different design conditions such as simple versus complex structures and operational versus experiential decision procedures. Results from this study suggest that, while distinctive effects indeed exist, there are important linkages between the environmental condition and the organizational design in affecting organizational performance.