Managing change through networks and values

California Management Review

Volumn 49, Issue 3, 2007, Pages

  Johnson Cramer, Michael E ^a   Parise, Salvatore ^b   Cross, Robert L ^c,d  

^a BUCKNELL UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b BABSON COLLEGE   (United States)

^c UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA   (United States)

^d Network Roundtable   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34250773495     PISSN: 00081256     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/41166396     Document Type: Review

References (95)

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43. Our primary goal here is to demonstrate how leaders can better enact change by combining cultural insights with those from network analysis. Of course, social network analysis is not new. The idea of drawing a picture (called a "sociogram") of who is connected to whom is often credited to Dr. J.L. Moreno. Since then, network techniques have influenced a variety of scholarly pursuits. For example, management scholars and sociologists have studied both local and virtual communities as well as the relationship between interaction patterns and social phenomena such as power. Cultural anthropologists have applied network analysis to social structure, roles, and kinship systems. Communication researchers have used network analysis to assess the rate of adoption and barriers to diffusion of such things as information, medicine, and the fax machine. Social psychologists have shown how the structure of group communication affects performance. Social network analysis is a set of analytical tools and theory with a long tradition in fields of sociology, social psychology, anthropology, and, increasingly, organization studies. Methodologically, the tools provide a means of assessing relationships and information or knowledge flow among informal networks within organizations. Readers interested in both the visual and quantitative possibilities of social network analysis should read J. Scott, Social Network Analysis, 2nd edition (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000)
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54. Clearly there are many ways to assess centrality in a network, ranging from direct measures (such as degree) to those that encompass indirect ties (such as betweenness and closeness). Although we might expect some interesting differences in these measures of centrality, in practice this distinction did not bear out as meaningful to the executives we worked with. Thus, for purposes of the applied managerial perspective important in this article, we will collapse these two categories. For a more thorough treatment of centrality measures, see S. Wasserman and K. Faust Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
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57. In the academic literature, this closely parallels the notion of cultural fit, discussed by C. O'Reilly, J. Chatman, and D. Caldwell, "People and Organizational Culture: A Q-Sort Approach to Assessing Person-Organization Fit," Academy of Management Journal, 34/3 (September 1991): 487-516.
58. There were a few interesting anomalies in the network. For example, there were one or two people who did not believe the culture was open yet did reach out to others frequently in an effort to change the culture. Powerful lessons can often be learned from the behavior of outliers like this if we can replicate these tendencies throughout a network via coaching, hiring, or career development programs. In this case, one low culture carrier told us that a key to getting interesting project work as well as being a high performer in the agency was personal connections with the customer, in this case, other government agencies. He was introduced to customers and key contacts through his supervisor early in his tenure at the agency, therefore helping to build his credibility. Realizing the impact that it had on his job, he's tried to do the same for newer employees in the agency. The key to becoming well connected, in his point of view, was not to become too insular and have only ties with people in the same department or agency, but to build more external ties with influential people.
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89. Ibid.
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