On the “missing link” between formal organization and informal social structure

Starling David Hunter (), Henrik Bentzen and Jan Taug
Additional contact information
Starling David Hunter: Florida Atlantic University
Henrik Bentzen: Join21 AS
Jan Taug: Join21 AS

Journal of Organization Design, 2020, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-20

Abstract: Abstract Over the last 40 years, organizational scholars have repeatedly called for more research to reconcile formalist and social network approaches to the intra-organizational structure. The former has primarily been concerned with the reporting relationship which manifests as the chain of command while research on the informal social structure relegates the reporting relationship to a wide and varied range of instrumental and affective relationships such as advice-seeking, knowledge-sharing, trust, and friendship which span the boundaries that the chain of command defines. In this study, we employ the chain of command distance—the length along the chain of command of a path connecting a pair of organizational actors—as the basis for formulating and testing hypotheses about how the formal organization and the informal social structure influence one another. First, we argue that whereas the formal structure affords only one, often very lengthy, path between any pair of actors, the combination of formal and informal structures results in a greater number of significantly shorter paths between actors. Next, we consider one effect of the formal organization on the informal social structure. In particular, we argue that there is an inverse relationship between the chain of command distance and the likelihood of a social or informal connection forming between a pair of actors. We test our hypotheses with demographic data collected from a public sector provider of health, education, and welfare services in rural Norway.

Keywords: Organization structure; Social structure; Informal structure; Organization design; Formal structure; Social network; Network analysis; Social network analysis; Organizational network analysis; Quadratic assignment procedure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1186/s41469-020-00076-x Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jorgde:v:9:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1186_s41469-020-00076-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/41469

DOI: 10.1186/s41469-020-00076-x

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Organization Design is currently edited by Børge Obel and Charles C. Snow

More articles in Journal of Organization Design from Springer, Organizational Design Community
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().