Communicative Constitution of Organizations in the Digital Age : Leveraging Network Analysis for the Identification of Communication Roles

Titelangaben

Konhäuser, Koray ; Mais, Lukas ; Schwarz, Nina ; Werner, Tim:
Communicative Constitution of Organizations in the Digital Age : Leveraging Network Analysis for the Identification of Communication Roles.
In: Proceedings of the 46th International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) 2025. - Nashville, USA , 2025

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Abstract

The widespread adoption of work-from-home policies following COVID-19 has permanently shifted organizational communication toward digital channels. While prior studies have largely focused on conceptual or single-channel approaches to describe communication roles within an organization, the dynamics of multi-channel communication remain underexplored. We address this gap by analyzing email and direct messaging data from a knowledge-intensive German organization over a period of two years. By applying social network analysis and k-Means clustering to daily centrality measures, we identify four distinct communication roles: operational core, information broker, opinion leader, and a non-participating cluster. Employees from the operational core take over routine coordination, information brokers facilitate knowledge transfer, and opinion leaders centralize strategic communication. Our findings empirically demonstrate dynamic role formation and extend the communicative constitution of organizations framework.