Jia Haozhe, Wang Lei
School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences and Beijing Key Lab for Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
Behav Sci (Basel). 2024 Jan 15;14(1):54. doi: 10.3390/bs14010054.
This paper provides a systematic review of the transfer and quantification of the concept of entropy in multidisciplinary fields and delves into its future applications and research directions in organizational management psychology based on its core characteristics. We first comprehensively reviewed the conceptual evolution of entropy in disciplines such as physics, information theory, and psychology, revealing its complexity and diversity as an interdisciplinary concept. Subsequently, we analyzed the quantification methods of entropy in a multidisciplinary context and pointed out that their calculation methods have both specificity and commonality across different disciplines. Subsequently, the paper reviewed the research on how individuals cope with uncertainty in entropy increase, redefined psychological entropy from the perspective of organizational management psychology, and proposed an "entropy-based proactive control model" at the individual level. This model is built around the core connotation of entropy, covering four dimensions: learning orientation, goal orientation, change orientation, and risk taking. We believe that psychological entropy, as a meta structure of individuals, can simulate, explain, and predict the process of how individuals manage and control "entropy" in an organizational environment from a dynamic perspective. This understanding enables psychological entropy to integrate a series of positive psychological constructs (e.g., lean spirit), providing extensive predictive and explanatory power for various behaviors of individuals in organizations. This paper provides a new direction for the application of the concept of entropy in psychology, especially for theoretical development and practical application in the field of organizational management.
本文对熵概念在多学科领域的转移与量化进行了系统综述,并基于其核心特征深入探讨了其在组织管理心理学中的未来应用及研究方向。我们首先全面回顾了熵在物理学、信息论和心理学等学科中的概念演变,揭示了其作为跨学科概念的复杂性和多样性。随后,我们分析了多学科背景下熵的量化方法,并指出其计算方法在不同学科间既有特异性又有共性。随后,本文回顾了关于个体如何应对熵增中的不确定性的研究,从组织管理心理学的角度重新定义了心理熵,并在个体层面提出了一个“基于熵的主动控制模型”。该模型围绕熵的核心内涵构建,涵盖学习导向、目标导向、变革导向和冒险四个维度。我们认为,心理熵作为个体的一种元结构,能够从动态角度模拟、解释和预测个体在组织环境中管理和控制“熵”的过程。这种理解使心理熵能够整合一系列积极心理构念(如精益精神),为组织中个体的各种行为提供广泛的预测和解释力。本文为熵概念在心理学中的应用,特别是在组织管理领域的理论发展和实际应用提供了新方向。