Power-law behavior in complex organizational communication networks during crisis

Abstract

Communication networks can be described as patterns of contacts which are created due to the flow of messages and information shared among participating actors. Contemporary organizations are now commonly viewed as dynamic systems of adaptation and evolution containing several parts, which interact with one another both in internal and in external environment. Although there is limited consensus among researchers on the precise definition of organizational crisis, there is evidence of shared meaning: crisis produces individual crisis, crisis can be associated with positive or negative conditions, crises can be situations having been precipitated quickly or suddenly or situations that have developed over time and are predictable etc. In this research, we study the power-law behavior of an organizational email communication network during crisis from complexity perspective. Power law simply describes that, the probability that a randomly selected node has k links (i.e. degree k) follows P(k)∼k- γ, where γ is the degree exponent. We used social network analysis tools and techniques to analyze the email communication dataset. We tested two propositions: (1) as organization goes through crisis, a few actors, who are prominent or more active, will become central, and (2) the daily communication network as well as the actors in the communication network exhibit power-law behavior. Our preliminary results support these two propositions. The outcome of this study may provide significant advancement in exploring organizational communication network behavior during crisis. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.