Chaotic Dynamics in Organization Theory

Modern organizations are increasingly seen as open complex adaptive systems, with fundamental natural nonlinear structures, subject to internal and external forces which may be sources of chaos. The related existing literature focuses mainly on verbal theories where chaos is used as a metaphor. Even if borrowing knowledge brings implicit risks, the usefulness of interdisciplinary knowledge is acknowledged. In this perspective, we show that the chaos metaphor grounded on mathematical models and psychological aspects of human behavior provides helpful insights to describing the complexity of small work groups, that go beyond the metaphor itself.