Modeling employees behavior in workplace dynamics

During the past years, Cellular Automata (CAs) have been extensively used for modeling of many complex systems and processes with great success. In this paper, we study a Cellular Automaton (CA) model for the influence of employees' behavior in a parameterized workplace environment taking into account different behavioral characteristics. In specific, we model employees' interactions based on their influence radius, the degree of their willingness on adaption of organizational norms and the employee's attitude in general in the under study workplace. The proposed CA model is taking into account employee loyalty, a combined statistic of the employee behavior and her/his insistence and company policies applied to the employees so as to restrain unwanted or impose desirable behavioral patterns in correspondence to the organization norms. Conclusively, the CA model facilitates the presentation and simulation of a workplace with a variety of employee behavioral characteristics and under adaptable company policies. Different workplaces were used to illustrate the simulation of employee behavior with CA model. As a result, the proposed model was practically used on two levels, firstly to estimate the workplace robustness and secondly to illustrate workspace dynamics. Finally, the CA model has been utilized to simulate behavioral patterns at a small enterprise in Greece. In specific, based on the employees answers to detailed surveys the CA model was initialized and then applied to describe the behavioral traits of the under study company employees. Finally, the proposed model, in all the examined cases can be utilized in conjunction with applied employee management techniques to facilitate managerial decisions and forecast the impact of employee behavioral changes and company decisions. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.