An Integrative Model of Managing Social Uncertainty: Group Identification, Perplexity, and Zipf’s Law

Abstract

The aim of the article is to develop a model integrating the concepts of group identification, socio-managerial perplexity, and Zipf’s law for diagnosing organizational climate in closed institutional systems. The methods include theoretical analysis, construct operationalization, and the development of metrics, including the Zipf deviation index (δZipf), the situational perplexity scale SPC-12, and the integrated CPI-balance index. The results show building an integrative CPI model to describe mechanisms by which information entropy influences the behavioural strategies of subjects in hierarchical systems; formulating four hypotheses for empirical testing, and defining methods for their verification. The findings state that perplexity may be regarded as a manageable parameter of a social system, whose dynamics are mediated by the regularities of information distribution and compensatory mechanisms of group identification. The proposed model has heuristic value for optimizing managerial communication in departmental educational organizations.