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This article is intended to spark discussion about how complexity thinking might help researchers and practitioners better understand and prevent corruption. Moral and ethical arguments can be problematic because individuals vary in their underlying values. Complex systems theory offers a less values-laden interpretation of the phenomenon, its mechanisms, and its solutions. We describe an emergent condition in organizing dynamics that exploits an externality of a larger system such that certain individuals or groups benefit at the expense of others in that larger system. They do this by creating a “value sink” that captures resources that would otherwise continue to circulate within the system. A value sink is “corrupt” when it is actively maintained by some who enforce conditions that either limit transparency or constrain the autonomy of others in violation of the rules of interaction within the larger system. It follows that institutionalized corruption is a dynamically stable cooperative regime that sustains a corrupt value sink.

This paper combines the complexity notions of phase transitions and tipping points with recent advances in cognitive neuroscience to propose a general theory of human proto-organizing. It takes as a premise that a necessary prerequisite for organizing, or "proto-organizing," occurs through emotional contagion in subpopulations of human interaction dynamics in complex ecosystems. Emotional contagion is posited to engender emotional understanding and identification with others, a social process that acts as a mechanism that enables (or precludes) cooperative responses to opportunities and risks. Propositions are offered and further research is suggested. 

Over five years ago, The Leadership Quarterly published a special issue on complexity to advance a new way of thinking about leadership. In shifting attention away from the individual to the organizing process itself, complexity added an important focus on process and context to leadership and management research. Yet, the complexity approach creates challenges for researchers who must combine or replace individual level constructs—like those built through surveys or factor analysis—with richer theories that investigate networked meso dynamics, multilevel phenomena, emergent processes, and organizational outcomes. To address this challenge, the present analysis draws on theoretical and empirical work over the last several years to identify five specific areas where complexity inspired research has led to new insights about the mechanisms that enable the organization to perform and adapt. It suggests propositions that describe how leadership and management, defined holistically, might activate complexity mechanisms to perform five essential organizing functions.

The purpose of this research is to contribute to the development of an interactive, systemic and ecosystem view of innovation and its management. This emerging interactive and systematic view of innovation labeled as Value Driven Innovation in this research, where enhanced symbiotic value is continuously discovered and realized in interactive processes among stakeholders such as customers, providers, suppliers and related partners. The main outcome of the research is a complexity conceptualization of value driven innovation, which synthesizes and extends to value-driven innovation management recent developments in complexity science. In addition, the findings may provide useful tools to clarify and enhance the manageability of innovation in the face of complexity, uncertainty and unpredictability.

The paper describes how complexity notions can be useful to model Servitization dynamics in industrial companies moving from product based to service oriented configuration. It is a movement towards joint value discovery in industrial service innovation management increasing potentials for radical or architectural innovation. Based on process oriented research on global industrial companies identifying transition phases of Servitization, a complexity model is developed to understand, predict and guide the process, mechanisms, and outcomes of increased capacity for joint value discovery. The model synthesizes and extends to service innovation management a complexity approach originally introduced by Goldstein, Hazy and Lichtenstein (2010) and called the Cusp of Change Model. The theoretical developments are particularly useful in guiding leadership of innovation in broader organizational and networked settings, contributing to development of service innovation strategies as well as systemic leadership of innovation activity in services in global industrial companies.

—This article is a first step toward a visualization and classification system for studying dynamic organizing structures of work. As a first step toward this researchobjective, this study brings together two active projects. One called “relatonics” studies work group formation and is primarily empirical and inductive. The other called “Human Interaction Dynamics (HID)” imports concepts, relationships and modeling from complexity science and is therefore primarily theoretical and deductive. The vision is to use social media, data gathering, and process simulation technologies to rigorously describe, systematically visualize, and validly model the complex dynamics of work processes of different types. This work will serve as a means to classify, study and improve the performance of work systems. We describe our progress to data and suggest further research.

This paper proposes an analytical framework for a complexity-informed theoretical approach to human interaction and organizations. In doing so, it addresses the increasing call for better theory supporting the microfoundations of social science. A key premise of the argument is that the primary imperatives of social actors are confronting uncertainty and adapting to change as a collective. As such, in addition to seeking requisite resources, human beings interact to gather and use information for their individual and collective benefit. The paper explores this perspective by proposing a complex systems model of organizing that differs from systems theory by placing the actors inside the system rather than assuming they act on the system. We propose a definition of information that enables us to explore the dynamics of human interaction as observers from the outside without necessarily knowing what the information means. This approach is analogous to how physical and biological systems are studied and is intended to complement, rather than replace existing approaches that tend to place their emphasis on inter-subjectivity and meaning-making rather than on the objective measurement of information as a physically measurable quantity