Communication network dynamics in a large organizational hierarchy

Abstract

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 (and much of what is known about this relationship) 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, organizational trees rooted at the senior leadership level. 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. By describing how communication clusters around the formal organization, we reveal the emergent communication dynamics between employees and the crucial role of position in the hierarchy.