Collaborative Research: HNDS-R: Altruistic stress, economic networks, and endogenous organizational change

Organizations shape and depend on cooperation among members, but the volatility of cooperation can cause organizations to fail. Co-operative organizations are especially dependent on cooperation, but also generate unique social benefits. Understanding how co-operatives persist on volatile patterns of cooperation can clarify the general role of cooperation in organizational change and survival.

This project examines how cooperation dynamics can drive organizational outcomes through a collaboration with a network of consumer co-operatives. The project will benefit participating co-operatives with data-driven organizational health reports, and benefit society at large with a cooperation management toolkit for any type of organization. This research can have profound impacts on the ability of organizations to grow and maintain cooperation and may contribute to strategies for growing cooperation to address pressing societal challenges.

The project seeks to improve our understanding of organizational evolution by testing a novel dynamical theory of organizational change based on altruistic stress - the psychological stress of unreciprocated cooperative effort to advance group goals. The research team develops a model of a generic organization, which specifies the relationship between tasks, cooperation, altruistic stress, institutions and organizational outcomes.

This model is tested with a rich multilevel organizational dataset. Building on a collaboration with a network of consumer co-operatives, the research team combines surveys, behavioral cooperation measures, organizational history data, and complete multi-year economic interaction networks across a large sample of co-operatives in the network. To assess the effect of altruistic stress on organizational change, the research team employs multilevel Bayesian analysis.

In addition, network methods are used to describe the structural features of cooperation networks associated with organizational tipping points. Results will improve our understanding of the mechanisms that drive organizational cooperation, survival, and evolution.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.