Organizational structure and communication networks in a university environment

TL;DR

This study analyzes email communication patterns within the University of Oslo to understand how organizational structure influences information flow, revealing hierarchical scaling laws and decay of communication with organizational distance.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence of hierarchical scaling laws and communication decay in organizational networks based on email data from a large university.

Findings

Email communication within modules scales with size to the power of 1.29.

Communication frequency decays exponentially with hierarchical distance.

Administrative message volume is proportional to lower-level individuals.

Abstract

The ``six degrees of separation" between any two individuals on Earth has become emblematic of the 'small world' theme, even though the information conveyed via a chain of human encounters decays very rapidly with increasing chain length, and diffusion of information via this process may be very inefficient in large human organizations. The information flow on a communication network in a large organization, the University of Oslo, has been studied by analyzing e-mail records. The records allow for quantification of communication intensity across organizational levels and between organizational units (referred to as ``modules"). We find that the number of e-mails messages within modules scales with module size to the power of $1.29\pm .06$, and the frequency of communication between individuals decays exponentially with the number of links required upwards in the organizational hierarchy before they are connected. Our data also indicates that the number of messages sent by administrative units is proportional to the number of individuals at lower levels in the administrative hierarchy, and the ``divergence of information" within modules is associated with this linear relationship. The observed scaling is consistent with a hierarchical system in which individuals far apart in the organization interact little with each other and receive a disproportionate number of messages from higher levels in the administrative hierarchy.