Understanding Communication Network Cohesiveness during Organizational Crisis: Effects of Clique and Transitivity

Various terms such as organizational mortality, organizational death, bankruptcy, decline, retrenchment and failure have been used in the literature to characterize different forms and facets of organizational crisis. Communication network studies have typically focused on nodes (individuals or organizations), relationships between those nodes, and subsequent affects of these relationships upon the network as a whole. Email networks in contemporary organizations are fairly representative of the underlying communications networks. We show that changes in communication networks and its associated group cohesiveness have implications for studying organizational crisis. In this paper, we analyze the changing communication network structure at Enron Corporation during the period of its crisis (2000-2001). Our goal was to understand how communication patterns and structure were affected by organizational crisis. Drawing on communication network crisis and group cohesiveness theory, we tested several propositions using the Enron email corpus: (1) Number of cliques increases, and (2) Communication network becomes increasingly transitive as organizations experience crisis. The results of the tests and their implications are discussed in this paper.