Most businesses impose a supervisory hierarchy on employees to facilitate management, decision-making, and collaboration, yet routine inter-employee communication patterns within workplaces tend to emerge more naturally as a consequence of both supervisory relationships and the needs of the organization. What then is the relationship between a formal organizational structure and the emergent communications between its employees? Understanding the nature of this relationship is critical for the successful management of an organization. While scholars of organizational management have proposed theories relating organizational trees to communication dynamics, and separately, network scientists have studied the topological structure of communication patterns in different types of organizations, existing empirical analyses are both lacking in representativeness and limited in size. In fact, much of the methodology used to study the relationship between organizational hierarchy and communication patterns comes from analyses of the Enron email corpus, reflecting a uniquely dysfunctional corporate environment. In this paper, we develop new methodology for assessing the relationship between organizational hierarchy and communication dynamics and apply it to Microsoft Corporation, currently the highest valued company in the world, consisting of approximately 200,000 employees divided into 88 teams. This reveals distinct communication network structures within and between teams. We then characterize the relationship of routine employee communication patterns to these team supervisory hierarchies, while empirically evaluating several theories of organizational management and performance. To do so, we propose new measures of communication reciprocity and new shortest-path distances for trees to track the frequency of messages passed up, down, and across the organizational hierarchy.

翻译：大多数企业通过监督层级来管理员工，以促进管理、决策和协作，然而工作场所内员工间的日常通信模式往往更自然地涌现，既是监督关系的结果，也源自组织需求。那么，正式组织结构与其员工之间涌现的通信之间存在何种关系？理解这种关系的本质对于成功管理组织至关重要。尽管组织管理学者提出了关于组织树与通信动态之间关系的理论，网络科学家也分别研究了不同类型组织中通信模式的拓扑结构，但现有的实证分析既缺乏代表性，又规模有限。事实上，用于研究组织层级与通信模式之间关系的大部分方法论都源自对安然公司电子邮件语料库的分析，这反映了一种独特的、功能失调的企业环境。在本文中，我们开发了一种新方法论来评估组织层级与通信动态之间的关系，并将其应用于微软公司——目前全球市值最高的公司，拥有约20万名员工，分为88个团队。这揭示了团队内部和团队之间独特的通信网络结构。然后，我们描述了员工日常通信模式与这些团队监督层级之间的关系，同时实证评估了组织管理和绩效的若干理论。为此，我们提出了新的通信互惠性度量方法以及树结构中的新最短路径距离，以跟踪在组织层级中向上、向下和横向传递的消息频率。