Explaining Organizational Decoupling through Informal Governance: A Latent Mediation Model of Academic Discipline

Abstract

This study examines how Informal governance is associated with Organizational decoupling among Chinese university students, with Academic discipline proposed as an explanatory mechanism. Drawing on self-determination and self-regulated learning perspectives, a conditional process model was specified and evaluated using a synthetic dataset of 486 cases. The simulated measurement model demonstrated acceptable reliability (composite reliability = 0.84) and fit (CFI = 0.95, TLI = 0.94, RMSEA = 0.049, SRMR = 0.046). Structural estimates suggested that Informal governance was positively associated with Academic discipline (β = 0.35, p < .001) and with Organizational decoupling (β = 0.25, p < .001). The standardized indirect effect through Academic discipline was 0.15, with a synthetic 95% bootstrap interval excluding zero. Together, the modeled predictors explained 42% of the variance in Organizational decoupling. The paper contributes a concise mechanism-based account of adaptive learning and demonstrates an empirical structure aligned with The Journal of Interactive Social Sciences. Because all results are simulated, the findings are illustrative and require validation with ethically collected data.