Exploring structural changes of the communications network during organizational crisis

Abstract

In this study, we explore patterns of organizational communication during normal state and crisis state using e-mail communications data. We apply social networks analysis (SNA) to understand the communication behavior and its structural changes during crisis from a real-world organization's communication data. By applying SNA, we first analyze the changes of social network structures from normal organizational state to crisis state. Second, we explore the changes of different positions or roles of the organizational communication networks during the crisis. Third, we apply measures of centrality (i.e., degree, betweenness, and closeness) for studying how different structural changes in social networks correlate to organizational hierarchy during normal and crisis state. © 2007 International Federation for Information Processing.