Distributed Competence: How Organizational Structure Affects Task Performance

This paper investigates how the interplay between team structure and relational openness of team members shapes the emergence of organizational competence as a distributed, system-level capability and, in turn, influences task performance. Drawing on an ethnographic study of the maintenance department of a Danish district heating utility—which operates through a hybrid team structure blending hierarchical and self-organizing elements—we develop an agent-based model that compares this empirically derived hybrid baseline against three archetypes drawn from the literature: (a) strict hierarchy, (b) relaxed (loose) hierarchy, and (c) organized anarchy. Agents in the model possess competence (task-specific knowledge and expertise) and relational openness (the propensity to both seek out and share advice, recommendations, information, and support). By systematically varying team structure and relational openness, we show that competence emerges not as an aggregated individual attribute but through patterned interactions enabled or constrained by structure. We find that strict hierarchies safeguard performance when relational openness is low but plateau quickly, whereas relaxed and anarchic structures depend on relational openness reaching a minimum threshold and exhibit a ceiling once relational ties become too dense. Finally, the hybrid configuration is slower to build performance but reaches the highest ceiling. Our study contributes to research on organizational competence by (1) reconceptualizing competence as an emergent outcome of the interaction between structure and relational openness and (2) demonstrating how agent-based simulation can uncover the micro-macro processes that build and sustain organizational competence.