Positeams - Positive systems intelligent teams, an agent-based simulator for studying group behaviour

Systems intelligence is the ability to act intelligently within complex systems involving interaction and feedback. Organizations and social groups are typical examples of everyday systems. The dynamics of social systems can be difficult to understand because of their systemic nature. This makes positively affecting the state of the system a challenging problem. The effects of positive emotions have been linked with increased performance in social groups and individuals. Thus simulating emotion dynamics can be used to better understand how to act more constructively within organizations. PoSITeams is a web-based multi-agent simulator to study the dynamics of emotions. We present a novel agent-based emotional contagion model based on psychological research to study the dynamics of positive and negative emotions in organizations. The purpose of the simulator is to let the user explore the effects of different behavioural and structural changes in organizations. This facilitates perceiving the organization as a system and also lets the user recognize the potential of changing the system from within, thus promoting systems intelligent behaviour in the organization. The presented emotional contagion model is also considered as an optimization problem to let the simulator suggest systems intelligent actions. The behaviour of the model and the optimization methods are examined with example simulations.