Optimizing Network Communication Structure for Knowledge Transmission in Organizations

Organizational stakeholders are often burdened with the amount of information coming their way through various means of organizational communication. Information overload has been studied, and methodologies have been proposed to optimize the amount of information to which each user is exposed to be consistent with their processing capacity, mostly through filtering approaches. Our focus is on investigating the impact of communication network topologies that maximize the overall network value. We propose a conceptual framework, followed by a mathematical simulation model, of a small network of uniform users with limited information processing capacities, exchanging messages that decay over time at a uniform, organization-wide rate. Exogenous concepts in our framework are the amount of information generated in an organizational network which is then presented to individual stakeholders, the stakeholder’s ability to process information and the organization-wide information decay factor. Within the context of our proposed framework, we investigate the ability of different network topologies to facilitate the dissemination of organizational information. The level of interconnectedness of the network is expressed via different graph metrics with the minimum inbound degree being the most critical indicator of network success within the context of our benchmark organizational model across a variety of scenarios representing different levels of information decay and the stakeholders’ ability to consistently contribute information of value to other stakeholders. Our results suggest that organizations should strive for levels of interconnectedness in their communication networks that are consistent with the stakeholders’ information processing capacity.