Coordination within and between organisms is one of the most complex abilities of cognitive systems, requiring the concerted regulation of many physiological constituents. A valuable framework for understanding biological intra- and inter-personal coordination is the coordinative structure, a self-organized assembly of physiological elements that collectively perform a specific function. The coordinative-structure framework has been successfully applied to a variety of intra- and inter-personal coordinative contexts, suggesting a generality across problems of motor control. Given the generality of the coordinative-structure framework, we investigated these properties in the context of a sufficiently general minimal model of biology, the dissipative structure. Dissipative structures are non-equilibrium self-organized systems exhibiting complex pattern formation in structure and behaviors. Coordinative structures have been theorized to be specific instantiations of dissipative structures, an idea that we develop by demonstrating the properties of a coordinative structure in an electrical dissipative structure. Our system – the Electrical Self-Organized Foraging Implementation (E-SOFI) – demonstrates dynamic reorganization in response to functional perturbation, a characteristic of coordinative structures called reciprocal compensation. This reciprocal compensation is corroborated by a dynamical systems model of the underlying physics. The empirical and modeling results point to the potential for a generic framework, in terms of physical, thermodynamic quantities, that can be applied to biological intra- and inter-personal coordination phenomena.