Organizational Network Analysis: Reveal the Informal Networks That Drive Change
Organizational network analysis helps managers uncover the informal relationships and influence patterns that determine how information, decisions, and chang…
Topic: Organizational Design & Change
Why It Matters
Every organisation has two structures. The first is the one on the slides: reporting lines, departments, formal roles. The second lives in the gaps between those boxes.
It is who people actually call when something goes wrong, whose opinion shifts a room before a decision is made, who quietly holds the institutional knowledge that nobody has ever written down.
Managing through only the formal structure is like navigating a city using only the metro map. It works until it does not, and when it does not, you often cannot tell why.
Organizational network analysis is a method for making the second structure visible. It identifies the informal relationships, communication flows, and influence patterns that determine how information travels, how decisions actually get made, and where change efforts succeed or stall.
For managers leading through restructuring, launching new initiatives, or trying to understand why a capable team keeps underperforming, the insights from this kind of analysis can reframe the problem entirely.
Before reading further, consider whether any of the following sound familiar. You have launched a change programme with strong executive sponsorship, and still it has not landed. You promoted someone technically strong and found that team cohesion dropped in ways you did not predict.
You have two departments that are supposed to collaborate but produce friction at every handoff, despite both managers being professionally cooperative. If any of these ring true, the informal network is likely part of the story.
Origin and Underlying Logic
Organizational network analysis draws from sociometry and social network analysis, fields developed in the mid-twentieth century to study how relationships shape group behaviour.
Its application to organisational settings grew through research in the 1990s and early 2000s, popularised by academics including Rob Cross and Andrew Parker, whose work helped translate the methodology into practical management tools. The purpose was always the same: to make visible the structures of relationship that formal data sources consistently miss.
The underlying logic is straightforward. Value, information, and influence in organisations do not flow solely through formal channels. They flow through relationships. When you map those relationships, patterns emerge that explain outcomes the org chart cannot.
High-performing teams often have dense internal connections and strong bridges to the rest of the organisation. Teams that feel siloed often turn out to be genuinely cut off at the network level, not merely culturally reluctant to collaborate. Individuals who appear peripheral in the hierarchy are sometimes the most critical connectors in practice.
Organizational network analysis is closely related to social network analysis, change management, and organisational behaviour. It is increasingly used alongside people analytics and workforce planning tools, particularly as passive data sources such as email and calendar metadata have made network mapping faster and less dependent on survey design.
Structure and Application
At its core, organizational network analysis produces a map of who connects with whom, and at what frequency and depth. The map is built from one of three data sources: structured surveys asking employees to identify who they go to for advice, information, or energy; passive data derived from communication metadata such as email or calendar patterns; or observational research gathered through interviews and ethnographic methods. Each has trade-offs in terms of data richness, privacy sensitivity, and practical feasibility.
The analysis typically identifies several key node types within the network. These categories help managers understand not just who is connected, but how the network functions as a whole:
Connectors: Individuals with a high volume of relationships across the network, often informal communication hubs whose absence would fragment information flow significantly
Brokers: Individuals who bridge otherwise disconnected groups, giving them disproportionate influence over cross-functional collaboration and knowledge transfer
Peripheral nodes: Individuals with few connections, who may be underutilised, disengaged, or deliberately selective in their working relationships
Isolated nodes: Individuals who appear to have almost no informal connections, which can indicate onboarding failure, cultural exclusion, or role misfit
The tool works at multiple levels. It can be applied across a whole organisation to guide structural decisions, within a single team to improve collaboration design, or at an individual level to support leadership development and succession planning. It is typically visualised as a node-and-edge network diagram, which makes the patterns immediately legible even to non-technical audiences.
A practical first step is to identify one specific question you want the analysis to answer:
Where is collaboration breaking down?
Who holds influence over adoption of a new process?
Which teams are over-reliant on a single individual?
Starting with a question prevents the analysis from becoming an end in itself. Once you have your question, a short structured survey of ten to fifteen questions, administered to a clearly defined group, will give you enough data to produce a useful initial map. The challenge, and this is where the deep dive becomes essential, is knowing how to interpret what you see and deciding what to do about it.
FAQ
The following questions address what managers most commonly want to know when first encountering this method.
Q: What is organizational network analysis?
A: Organizational network analysis is a method for mapping the informal relationships and communication patterns within an organisation. Rather than relying on the formal org chart, it reveals who actually collaborates with whom, who holds informal influence, and where communication bottlenecks exist. It uses survey data, communication metadata, or observation to build a visual map of the real network beneath the organisational structure.
Q: How is organizational network analysis different from a standard employee survey?
A: A standard employee survey captures individual attitudes and experiences. Organizational network analysis captures relational data: not how someone feels, but who they interact with and how. The output is a map of connections rather than a distribution of opinions. This distinction makes it especially useful for diagnosing collaboration problems, identifying informal leaders, and understanding how information flows across teams.
Q: Can organizational network analysis work for small teams?
A: It can, but the value is more limited at small scale. Network analysis becomes most revealing when applied to groups of twenty or more, where informal patterns are less visible to the naked eye. In a team of five or six, a manager who pays attention usually already knows who connects with whom. The tool adds most value when complexity or size makes informal structures genuinely hard to observe directly.
Q: How do I know if organizational network analysis is right for my situation?
A: It is most likely worth the effort when you are dealing with a problem that the org chart cannot explain. If you are managing change that keeps stalling despite apparent alignment, trying to understand why two teams cannot collaborate effectively, or planning a restructure and wanting to avoid cutting informal bridges that keep things running, this is a relevant tool. If your team is small, stable, and observable directly, the overhead may outweigh the benefit.
Q: Is ONA the same as social network analysis?
A: Social network analysis is the broader academic discipline; organizational network analysis is its application to workplace settings. ONA draws on the same mathematical foundations and visualisation methods, but focuses specifically on questions relevant to managers: who influences whom, where collaboration breaks down, who the informal leaders are, and how network structure supports or undermines organisational goals.