SNA for Companies in Cultural and Structural Transitions

Prepared by Jane Phelan, not enrolled in the 2nd half of the course

Overview: The leadership of company involved in financial inclusion has decided to shift the company culture from one of transactions to one of community relationships. However, for a financial company, a shift in culture to reflect community relationships will not be easy. I am currently working with a team to write a case on the company's cultural and transition, and propose a social network analysis (SNA) of the company to understand how it might best implement its new strategy.

Objective: The CEO has tasked a very small 2-3 person team to implement the new strategy. Not only is the team small, but it has many roles, as it also manages the company's corporate citizenship, cause marketing, and philanthropy efforts. Therefore, this proposal is meant to map out the organizational network and information flows within the company. This SNA has two key objectives:

1.The results of the SNA will allow the team to prioritize their efforts to implement the new strategy. The team will not be able to work directly with every staff member in the headquarters. Therefore, this SNA will help the team understand how information flows within the company and which employees might be most influential in changing the culture of the company.

2.As case writers, we have an interest in understanding how the small team within the company manages its existing relationships. We want to better understand how this team operates: The way they leverage relationships and who they interact with might provide lessons for other corporate social responsibility teams who wish to do similar work.

Hypotheses: Relevant to the first objective, I imagine that we would see a dense network of connections within headquarters, with fewer connections between headquarters and those providing financial services. The team is already aware of the more “formal” nodes who may influence opinion and understanding (department heads, etc.) and we would therefore be interested in identifying individuals within headquarters who are central to the network without this information being reflected in an organizational chart.

Method: This SNA would use a survey as the key method of data collection, but would also involve some focused interviews to ensure that we understand the way that the company operates before beginning to work with the data we are analyzing. It must be noted that it will be easier to collect survey data for the headquarters than in the field. This survey will generate a wealth of data: In order to ensure that the data is analyzed in full, we will divide up the data and look at individual networks before compiling for an overall picture of the network.

Survey: Survey questions will capture data on the nature of relationships within the employee and service provider groups and across the groups. If possible, we will attempt to gather attribute data on our own in order to shorten the length of the survey for the highest response possible. The surveys for employees and financial service providers will necessarily be slightly different because of the nature of the work. The survey questions may change given additional information we would be provided on the nature of the firm’s business.

Complications/Outstanding Questions: In order to implement this SNA, the highest levels of the company's leadership would have to be on board and understand the value that SNA could bring. This could require individual interest in SNA or previous experience with SNA. In addition, the scope of this SNA might be too large, and thus, implementation may require focusing the analyis on the company's headquarters staff or financial service providers in the field.