Quantifying and Improving Resilience in the Informal Social Networks of Organizations

Abstract

Organizations spend a considerable amount of time designing their organizational structure. These structures generally reflect the priorities and functions of the organization and deserve attention. However, research has reinforced the power of informal networks to affect performance and communication. The ability of a person to leverage their weak ties to build a coalition, find a key piece of information, or signal a warning has appreciable impacts on an organization’s ability to perform. This paper explores an informal structure and offers methods to re-enforce its resilience. In this unique network, the nodes represent people and their edges represent the overlap of tenure throughout their career. We define the resilience of this organization by exploring its error tolerance and offer a procedure that leverages the ClusterRank centrality for improving resilience through targeted internal assignments and the strengthening of informal ties. Interventions demonstrate promising results with appreciable shifts in the critical threshold with minimal adjustments. By utilizing these tools, organizations can better understand and address possible deficiencies in their informal structure’s resilience and remain better postured to respond to perturbations.