From Organisational Structure to Organisational Behaviour Formalisation

To understand how an organisational structure relates to organisational behaviour is an interesting fundamental challenge in the area of organisation modelling. Specifications of organisational structure usually have a diagrammatic form that abstracts from more detailed dynamics. Dynamic properties of agent systems, on the other hand, are often specified in the form of a set of logical formulae in some temporal language. This paper addresses the question how these two perspectives can be combined in one framework. It is shown how for different aggregation levels and other elements within an organisation structure, sets of dynamic properties can be specified. Organisational structure provides a structure of (interlevel) relationships between these multiple sets of dynamic properties. Thus organisational structure is reflected in formalisation of the dynamics of organisational behaviour. As an illustration, for the AGR organisation modelling approach it is shown how a formal foundation can be obtained for integrated specification of both structure and behaviour of an organisation