ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURES AND COMMUNICATIONS MEDIA: A SOCIAL NETWORK PERSPECTIVE

Members of organizations interact using many modes of communication. Interactions are the base for a daily knowledge flow. Knowledge run on many patterns, some of them are formal and based on the official structure of the organization while others are informal and based on individual and organizational structures. This paper examines how the ties obtained by mining emails archives are different by interactions that occur by using other modes of communication. We compared social network properties of both the network implied by email and the network implied by four of the most used modes of communication by two communities of faculty, researchers and students within a school of management. The communication modes mainly adopted were face-to-face interactions, instant messaging, phone and email. The first community was made up of 52 members whose roles were representative of the entire organizational structure. The second community was made up of “contributors and coordinators” and was a sub-set of the first community. Whereas for the former we monitored only email exchanges, for the latter we took into consideration all the information and knowledge flowing through the whole set of communication modes adopted. We found that email network is different from network implied by other media with reference both to the average use of different media and to actors’ betweeness centrality. The results of this study show how formal and informal structures cohabit in a complex organization and are reflected by a composite set of modes of communication, rather than by the mere exchange of email. By showing some of the email’s biases in approximating the complete social ties, we aimed at creating a parallelism between email and formal information flow from one side versus other modes of communication (face-to-face, instant messaging and phone) and informal working ties from the other side.