How SNA Can Help Organization Identify Latent Problems of Integrity within their Employee Base

Business has never faced the type of ethical challenges that it faces in actual global economy.  Today’s complexities make people struggle in their ways to accomplish their goals, even if those ways imply making decision in the fine line between what is good and what is not. The big problem is that at the moment that only one employee acts for his one personal benefit, the whole company ethics and success is compromised. A good reputation might be the most important business’s assets. However, it is also the easiest to loose and the most challenging to maintain.

Since employees are usually hesitant to turn in their colleagues involved in unethical practices, the use of Social Network Analysis could not only help organization to identify latent problems of integrity and moral within their employee base, but also highlight the persons with good perceptions among their coworkers.

Since integrity is associated with values such as consistency, honesty, reliability, trustworthy, authenticity and respectful, questions that ask for people to identify who they think can represent those values within the organization can help to recognized subgroups of people that is highly notice by others, but also detect isolated points that could generate some alerts to do a further evaluation.

By asking employees the following questions the data required to do a first analysis can be obtained.

•         Which persons in your department will you trust them a secret?
•         Which persons in your department are the most reliable?
•         Who you consider the most ethical person in your department?

If the questions are asked in a positive way, I believe employees will be willing to share their opinions. Questions that look for point out a bad behavior might not be so easy to get.

In terms of measures:

◼  Density: can reflect how balance is the organization around integrity. At more connections more people is perceived as acting in an ethical way.

◼   Degree: will help to distinguish the persons more recognize in terms of integrity for their coworkers.

◼   Eigenvector: identify who other persons are connected with the ones more value.

◼   Isolated points: as alerts of people that need further evaluation.

The amplified universe of global stakeholders with competing value interests and value systems, require that companies create processes to clarify, integrate and reinforce their ethical business conduct guidelines. In addition, to create the right mechanisms to have a sense of what employees perceived or know about their colleagues but don’t share with the management teams.