Communication network dynamics in a large organizational hierarchy

Abstract

Most businesses impose a supervisory hierarchy on employees to facilitate management, decisionmaking, and collaboration. In contrast, 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. Scholars of organizational management have proposed theories relating organizational trees to communication dynamics and measures of business performance. Separately, network scientists have studied the topological structure of communication patterns in different types of organizations. However, the nature of the relationship between a formal organizational structure and emergent communications between employees remains unclear. In this paper, we study associations between organizational hierarchy and communication dynamics among approximately 200,000 employees of a large software company in May 2019. We propose new measures of communication reciprocity and new shortest-path distances for trees to characterize the frequency of messages passed up, down, and across the organizational hierarchy. By dividing the organization into 88 teams -organizational trees rooted at the senior leadership level -we identify distinct communication network structures within and between teams. These structures are related to the function of these teams within the company, including sales, marketing, engineering, and research. We discuss the relationship of routine employee communication patterns to supervisory hierarchies in this company, and empirically evaluate several theories of organizational management and performance.