Organizational Evolution Under Endogenously Dynamic Selection Environment

We consider organizational evolution in an endogenously changing selection environment. Following the majority of research on evolution in the biological realm, organizational scholars predominantly modeled selection environment as being exogenously endowed. We introduce a selection environment that can be shaped and modified by organizations themselves. In this endogenously dynamic environment, we examine the efficacy of two most representative evolutionary operators – mutation and imitation – in both exogenously and endogenously changing selection environment. We find that imitation fares quite differently depending on the type of selection environment while mutation is robust regardless of the environment. We further show that there is a complementary effect between mutation and imitation under the exogenously changing environment while there is no such effect under the endogenous setting. Overall, our study suggests that understanding the nature of evolutionary strategies for different selection regime is critical for organizational evolution.