An investigation on the relationship between informal networks and organizational performance

Abstract

By mapping both social related (energizing) and functional (information) related informal networks and collecting the performance data correspondingly in one of the biggest Express Company in the world, this paper showed: (1) There is significant relationship between organizational performance and informal network indices, which means we can predict orgniztions' performance by the informal network patterns. (2) Emotional network showed stronger relationship with social aspects of organizational performance and functional network showed stronger relationship with functional aspects of organizational performance, which implies that we need to choose different informal networks to predict different kind of performance. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.