10 - Organizational Crises

Summary

The previous chapter discussed the ways in which social networks systematically affect patterns of turnover in organizations and attitudes of people left behind. The current chapter takes a closer look at how such patterns of cross-unit network links help organizations deal with crises. It is inevitable that people cross organizational boundaries in pursuit of careers. But as they move – from one department to another, for example – they also connect units that might not have been linked previously. Thus, a somewhat haphazard network of informal relations is likely to characterize any system of organizational units within an overall umbrella organization.

Recently, there has been considerable attention given to the ways in which patterns of clustering and connectivity develop in networks (Dorogovtsev and Mendes, 2003), but little of this work has focused on the design of organizational networks. In general, the new science of “small worlds” has been content to assume optimal designs emerge through relatively serendipitous processes, although the possibility of more goaldirected network design has been discussed (e.g., Kilduff and Tsai, 2003). In this chapter, the emphasis is on comparing informal patterns of organization across two types of structure: an optimal structure, constructed on the basis of theory; and a “natural” structure that emerges on the basis of social interaction.

It is argued here that emergent networks, left to themselves without the aid of conscious design, will form naturally in ways that are suboptimal, even dysfunctional, for the organization.