论文标题

大型组织层次结构中的通信网络动态

Communication network dynamics in a large organizational hierarchy

论文作者

Josephs, Nathaniel, Peng, Sida, Crawford, Forrest W.

论文摘要

大多数企业对员工强加了监督层次结构,以促进管理,决策和协作,但由于监督关系和组织的需求,工作场所内的常规雇主互动沟通模式往往更自然地出现。那么,正式的组织结构与员工之间紧急沟通之间的关系是什么?了解这种关系的性质对于成功管理组织至关重要。尽管组织管理的学者提出了将组织树与交流动态有关的理论,并且分别研究了网络科学家在不同类型的组织中研究了交流模式的拓扑结构,但现有的经验分析都缺乏代表性和规模有限。实际上,用于研究组织层次结构和沟通模式之间关系的许多方法都来自对安然电子邮件语料库的分析,这反映了一种独特的功能失调的公司环境。在本文中,我们开发了评估组织层次结构与沟通动态之间关系的新方法,并将其应用于当前最有价值的公司的Microsoft Corporation,由大约200,000名员工组成,分为88个团队。这揭示了团队之间和之间的不同通信网络结构。然后,我们表征了常规员工沟通模式与这些团队监督层次结构的关系,同时凭经验评估了几种组织管理和绩效理论。为此,我们提出了新的通信互惠和新的最短路径距离的措施,以跟踪向上,向下和整个组织层次结构传递的消息的频率。

Most businesses impose a supervisory hierarchy on employees to facilitate management, decision-making, and collaboration, yet routine inter-employee communication patterns within workplaces tend to emerge more naturally as a consequence of both supervisory relationships and the needs of the organization. What then is the relationship between a formal organizational structure and the emergent communications between its employees? Understanding the nature of this relationship is critical for the successful management of an organization. While scholars of organizational management have proposed theories relating organizational trees to communication dynamics, and separately, network scientists have studied the topological structure of communication patterns in different types of organizations, existing empirical analyses are both lacking in representativeness and limited in size. In fact, much of the methodology used to study the relationship between organizational hierarchy and communication patterns comes from analyses of the Enron email corpus, reflecting a uniquely dysfunctional corporate environment. In this paper, we develop new methodology for assessing the relationship between organizational hierarchy and communication dynamics and apply it to Microsoft Corporation, currently the highest valued company in the world, consisting of approximately 200,000 employees divided into 88 teams. This reveals distinct communication network structures within and between teams. We then characterize the relationship of routine employee communication patterns to these team supervisory hierarchies, while empirically evaluating several theories of organizational management and performance. To do so, we propose new measures of communication reciprocity and new shortest-path distances for trees to track the frequency of messages passed up, down, and across the organizational hierarchy.

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