Investigating the effects of Social and Organizational Structures on Information spread: a simulation-based Approach.

Organizations rely on access to information to deal with environmental uncertainty and to support their decision making processes. Consequently, they implement structural mechanisms and information processing capabilities to enhance the information flow, such as integrated information systems and formal hierarchies. Particularly in environments that are strongly influenced by information and communication technology, the ability of an organization to provide decision makers with useful and trusted information is also dependent on social interactions outside of the organizational hierarchy. This research therefore jointly analyses the effects of social and organizational network structures on information spread for archetypical organizational configurations. Drawing upon literature on information diffusion in social networks and on organizational design, a conceptual model of information spread in organizations is developed. Based on this model, a simulation is built, validated, and a series of simulation experiments is performed. First, the simulation is able to replicate observations from other studies. Second, the results indicate that information spreading patterns in organizations differ significantly, depending on the organizational configuration, the position of a person within this configuration, and the employed communication strategy. Implications and next steps for further, more detailed analyses are eventually discussed.