Applying network analysis to measure organizational behaviors using R software

2019

Applying network analysis to measure organizational behaviors using R software Abstract The amount of research investigating psychological networks has grown substantially over the last decade but to our knowledge this is the first study applying network analysis methodology to the fields of OB/HRM. As such, this study aims to provide researchers and practitioners with an easy-to-use syntax to conduct network analysis for the exploration of relationships among organizational behaviors. Unlike the mainstream techniques used in psychometrics (e.g., principal component analysis and structural equation modelling), which are constrained by the number of associations among variables or assumptions regarding dimensionality, network analysis is able to analyze the whole set of items at once in order to find the most representative associations among them. A step-by-step guide is provided with an example showing how to test potential relationships between engagement and authentic leadership using the R package bootnet. Besides information on edge-weights and centrality measures, this paper covers a bootstrapping procedure to test their accuracy and stability when small sample sizes are used. The possibilities of applications of psychological networks to organizational behavior and HRM practices are endless and can help overcome some of the limitations of the traditional statistical techniques applied to these fields.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2022

Organizations allocate considerable resources in surveys aimed at assessing how employees perceive certain job aspects. These perceptions are often modeled as latent constructs (e.g., job satisfaction) measured by multiple indicators. This approach, although useful, has several drawbacks such as a strong reliance on local independence and a lower performance in exploratory contexts with many variables. In this paper, we introduce psychological network analysis (PNA) as a novel method to examine organizational surveys. It is first argued how the network approach allows studying the complex patterns of attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors that make up an organizational survey by modeling them as elements in an interconnected system. Next, two empirical demonstrations are presented showcasing features of this technique using two datasets. The first demonstration relies on original organizational survey data (N = 4270) to construct a network of attitudes and behaviors related to innovative work behavior. In the second demonstration, drawing on archival leadership data from an organization (N = 337), the focus lies on comparing structural properties of leadership attitude networks between subsamples of supervisors and nonsupervisors. We conclude this paper by discussing how PNA constitutes a promising avenue for researching organizational phenomena which typically constitute a set of interconnected elements.

EUROPEAN RESEARCH STUDIES JOURNAL, 2021

Purpose: Organizational network analysis is usually a long and complex process, consisting of many steps and generally using many analytical tools. Design/Methodology/Approach: Numerous papers have been written about the analysis itself, especially about network measures, concepts, and visualizations used in research. This is unfortunately not the case for the data collection process. Findings: The practice of conducting research shows that effective data collection is often a barrier to network analysis in organizations. The current situation related to COVID-19 has become an additional difficulty in assessing the occurrence of relationships between employees based on observations. Practical Implications: An analysis of the literature and especially years of conducted studies in different organizations show that researchers still lack deeper insights into that kind of issue, such as identifying the main challenges and potential ways to improve the data collection process. This is a research gap we strive to address within this paper. Originality/Value: In the addition to the effort made towards structuring the entire process of data collection in the organizational network analysis research contribution of this paper include our proposals of potential improvements that could be made to the data collection process in analyzing organizational networks.

2019

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis. com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Strategic Change, 1995

International Journal of Organization Theory & Behavior, 2021

Purpose This study investigates organizational climate under the thriving at work perspective using a network approach. The authors demonstrate how organizational climate functions as a complex system and what relationships between variables from different dimensions are the most important to characterize the construct. Design/methodology/approach By surveying 119,266 workers from 284 companies based in Brazil, the authors estimated a Gaussian graphical model with LASSO regularization for the complete dataset and for two subsets of cases randomly drawn from the whole dataset. The walktrap algorithm was applied for community detection, and a strong model for measurement invariance was fit to test whether the organizational climate is perceived similarly across groups. Findings Results show that the networks estimated for both groups are quite consistent, with similar number of communities and items detected. The same pattern was found for the expected influence of each item. Measurement invariance was confirmed, showing that organizational climate is perceived similarly in both groups. The most important community detected and whose items have higher levels of centrality was organizational commitment, followed by a community centered around macro-organizational aspects covering cultural integrity, organizational agility and responsible leadership. Research limitations/implications Studies in the field have attested to the possibility of investigating the phenomenon from four (Campbell et al., 1970) to over 80 dimensions (Koys and DeCottis, 1991). As a result, since several dimensions have been produced to investigate organizational climate, there is no consensus on the quality and number of dimensions that should be considered to measure such a vast and multifaceted construct. Built on thriving at work perspective, eight dimensions were devised to cover a wide range of characteristics that distinguish organizational climate, including those related to Industry 4.0 (Coetzee, 2019). However, one may argue that a few dimensions, namely social responsibility, diversity and inclusion, or even more items describing work-life balance could expand the depth and breadth of the instrument and potentially trigger new associations that might eventually impose a new logic to the comprehension of climate as a system. Future studies combining the dimensions investigated in this study with other dimensions are therefore highly recommended for an even more comprehensive investigation. Practical implications The results of this investigation show how to apply psychological networks to gain insights into different variables and dimensions of organizational climate. These findings can be used for the development of organizational policies focused on the most relevant aspects of organizational climate. This information would allow organizations to go beyond simply describing the individual frequencies for each item and could even be used to create a weighted scoring model that could prioritize variables with higher levels of centrality. Originality/value To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that investigates organizational climate using psychological networks; it provides a better understanding of the relationships established between items from different dimensions as opposed to the common cause framework whose focus is on the investigation of dimensions separately.

International Journal of Business and Management

There has been an increasing interest in organization theory field towards network theory and methodology during the recent years. Academy of Management Review which is one of the most important journals in this field published a special issue concerning the organizational networks. ocial embeddedness theory of Granovetter (1985) can be seen as a milestone for the widespread usage of social network methodology in the field of economics and management. Network research methodology has gained importance to measure the social capital of the organizations (Bordieu, 1983 and Coleman, 1988) for understanding institutional effects in an organizational field (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Galaskiewicz and Wasserman, 1989) and to map resource dependency relations between organizations (Pfefer and Salancik, 1978). Networks research methodology can also be used to determine some micro issues in organizations like coalition groups, cliques, social capital formation tendency of the actors. The purpose of this study is to provide information to the potential researchers about basic aspects of social network theory, usage areas in organizational research field, data collection, data entry, measurement items, data analysis and software tools for analyzing social networks.

Volume 8

An effective social network is built on “social relationships,” fostered by increasing “reliance” on another person to complete tasks (within required parameters) because he or she has delivered reliably in the past; and “trust”— an emotional, interpersonal connection that grows out of reliance, based on testing/consulting with another individual over time. “Reliance” and “trust” foster high levels of “collaboration,” an essential ingredient for creating high performing teams. Developing teams that have trust among the participants is important as the teams engage in information transfer, knowledge exchange, and finally knowledge sharing, leading to full “social network engagement.” In this paper, we combine the Social Network Analysis which describes the “mechanics” of a social network in an engineering/architecture firm with data, gathered using a psychometric instrument, The Birkman Method, to quantify the behavioral and personality characteristics of individuals in that firm—the...

Management and Organization Review, 2007

The study of organizational networks has a long history in the social and behavioural sciences. On the micro side, anthropologists and psychologists studied interpersonal networks within organizations (e.g., Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939). On the macro side, sociologists studied interlocking directorates (