Characteristics of the Network Organization

A number of management researchers have considered examining organizations as networks of dynamic relationships. This view offers a mechanism permit administrators to handle the processes of interaction unfolding in their organizations and to think about the real netwyman blogs intricacy of organizational life. The dynamic perspective may also provide easier answers to problems. It is sometimes easier for administrators to change one or a few network patterns in the interest of increased efficiency or improved thought patterns than to shift entire sectors around, as you must do in manipulating organizational graphs.

Analysis of the static structural how late is the closest grocery store open elements tends to pay attention to the business in general, to take a long-range view. A lot more is added in network research. One can look more closely at individuals or subunits getting back together various networks and translate organizational issues of centralization into individual issues of centrality. One can specify in terms of connections the various roles people play in networks. And one can move relatively easily from thinking about organizations as totalities to thinking about various individuals in those organizations.

A network is some linkages among a precise set of people in which the character of the linkages is specified. Thus, a network may be built around job requirements or how far better get things done. It may be structured by social connections or how people interact informally utsav7fun. Network observations began in research laboratory scientific studies in the 1950s but just weren’t done in real organizations. Groups of three, four, or five persons were studied to discover how variously charged structures influenced problem resolving and member thought patterns. Structure was varied by imposing rules about who could talk to whom. The findings from these studies were consistent: for simple problems, centralized networks, in which information about the problem is delivered to just one person, produced solutions faster with fewer errors than did decentralized networks, in which information was delivered to everyone.

However, when problems were complex,  wpc 2026 decentralized networks were superior. Unfortunately, findings from research laboratory investigations such as these do not always generalize to people at work.

For many years the results of these small-group network studies were presented in management textbooks as the gospel about how to engage in efficient problem resolving. The research exhausted itself, however, and several years passed before interest was restored in organizations as net works of relationships. One reason for the stagnated research was that larger organizational networks could not be studied. Yet these resembled the complex interrelationships found in reality. Complex networks were ignored prior to the 1970s because reducing data from them to understandable forms required high-speed computers that were not readily accessible. Today a number of computer programs are around for describing networks.

One kind of network of interest to administrators is the grapevine. Grapevines are naturally occurring net works that are familiar to everyone members of organizations. Efficient and fast, grapevines are an road for administrators both to obtain information about what are you doing in their organizations and to send out important info. Political leaders understand the value of pretesting their constituents’ acceptance of new programs and plans by leaking them to large-scale networks. Grapevines offer informal ways for administrators to move information for any of a variety of purposes.

Various networks coexist in organizations and are used for purposes other than moving information. The three types, apart from the grapevine, are task networks, authority networks, and social networks. All the types overlap and serve different organizational functions. One set of high- technology military organizations over a six-month period found that task networks developed more quickly and became stable sooner than other kinds of networks. We were holding closely accompanied by the development of social networks. Authority networks were much slower to develop and never reached the quality of maturation of the other two kinds. These findings are somewhat surprising, particularly for military organizations. They claim that administrators should pay close attention, in particular, to the development of task networks, implementing change where these networks appear to be dysfunctional to the goals of the organization.

A number of network properties have been identified. Although it is not difficult to infer some of the consequences of these properties for organizations, little research relating them to organizational performance has been done. These network properties follow:

— Connectedness, or the extent to which people in networks are interconnected
— Centrality, or their education to which network contact follow the formal organizational power structure
— Reciprocity, or their education to which there is two-way communication
— Directory differentiation, or their education to which different organizational levels are represented in the network
— Horizontally differentiation, or their education to which different job areas are represented in the network

Within a network are groupings that are more elegantly interconnected than all of those other network. Coalitions and cliques are two types of groupings. Coalitions are temporary alliances among people for some distinct purpose, such as control over a hobby. Coalitions often form in times of unusual or non-routine demand, perhaps when firms develop new products or when the environment appears threatening. A jv is a coalition, as is the formation of a cartel such as OPEC. Cliques are permanent groupings, often involving friendships, in which all members are directly linked and may or may not exchange information about things other than friendship. Coalitions and cliques can both be taken to maximize the ability of some group in an organization.

While administrators should be sensitive to the development of coalitions and cliques in their organizations, helping them to develop in order to weaken depending on the circumstances, they also need to be aware of how networks within organizations are tied to the exterior. This problem has been released in the sociological literature under the rubric of the effectiveness of weak ties.

The effectiveness of a tie between two individuals within a network or in two different networks is defined by the amount of time, emotional intensity, intimacy, and reciprocal services that characterize the tie. The stronger the tie between any two individuals, the bigger the proportion of men and women in a group to whom they will both be tied by the strong or a weak tie. Strong ties produce lustrous networks, weak ties less lustrous networks. Strong ties are likely to create closed systems, impassable to outside information. Strongly tied groups cannot obtain or disseminate information, co-opt their environments, or develop coalitions with outsiders.

If organizations are to reach their goals, the doctor has to be permeable and sensitive to outside conditions, however. Thus, some persons in a given group need to have weak ties with persons in other groupings. These weak ties afford opportunities for the flow of information, ideas, innovations, and resources across groups, making them enormously important for diffusion in and across organizations. Benefit of weak ties might suggest to a manager that she needs to develop them where they are nonexistent and that removing them by transferring or shooting people or by changing their jobs could actually harm the business. Alternatively, strong internal ties have been related to low internal conflict.