Actor Role Analysis
How do we tell what a person’s role is within an organization? We can start with their title and position in the organizational chart, but that rarely tells the whole story.
Some employees exercise more or less responsibility than others in the same position because of office politics, delegation patterns, or simply the level of respect they receive from their co-workers. Some will do jobs outside their expected domain because of a recent move from another department, or because that department is short staffed. Some employees ambitiously seek new tasks, while others simply coast. The deviations from the organizational chart due to all these causes and more are often immensely useful for understanding how an organization functions.
Many questions can be answered by viewing an organization as a network of actors, basing the network on their communications with each other. An individual’s position within the network then corresponds to his or her role within the organization. Centrality calculations can be used to identify key individuals. Role similarity measurements can identify equivalence classes of actors, often corresponding to tiers of management or expertise.
For example, we can demonstrate information-gathering networks by emphasizing communications that relay information with little additional content (so-called “mere forwards”). Central actors in such a network are those whom co-workers most feel the need to keep informed. These people tend to be decision makers.
We can also construct networks using communications about a particular topic or business process, such as finance or marketing. The key actors in the network will change as the topic changes. This gives us a nuanced view into the relevant domains of expertise of the various actors.
Often, communication networks show that an organization separates into many smaller working groups, which communicate little with each other. Actors with interface roles bridging these gaps become readily visible. Such persons can have an unexpectedly large influence on organizational behavior.
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