Organizational structure and communication networks in a university environment

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 email 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 email messages within modules scales with module size to the power of 1.29±.06 , and the frequency of communication between individuals decays exponentially with the number of links required upward 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.