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Over the last 40 years, organizational scholars have repeatedly called for more research to reconcile formalist and social network approaches to the intra-organizational structure. The former has primarily been concerned with the reporting relationship which manifests as the chain of command while research on the informal social structure relegates the reporting relationship to a wide and varied range of instrumental and affective relationships such as advice-seeking, knowledge-sharing, trust, and friendship which span the boundaries that the chain of command defines. In this study, we employ the chain of command distance—the length along the chain of command of a path connecting a pair of organizational actors—as the basis for formulating and testing hypotheses about how the formal organization and the informal social structure influence one another. First, we argue that whereas the formal structure affords only one, often very lengthy, path between any pair of actors, the combination of formal and informal structures results in a greater number of significantly shorter paths between actors. Next, we consider one effect of the formal organization on the informal social structure. In particular, we argue that there is an inverse relationship between the chain of command distance and the likelihood of a social or informal connection forming between a pair of actors. We test our hypotheses with demographic data collected from a public sector provider of health, education, and welfare services in rural Norway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the literature linking organization structure to performance falls into two broad research streams. One stream concerns formal structure - the hierarchy of authority or reporting relationships as well as the degree of standardization, formalization, specialization, etc. The impact of formal structure and other elements of organization design on performance is typically contingent on factors such as strategic orientation, task characteristics, and environmental conditions. The other research stream focuses on informal structure - a network of interpersonal and intra-organizational relationships. Properties of informal structure are typically shown to have a more direct (less contingent) impact on organizational performance. Despite these pronounced differences in the conceptualization of organization structure, considerable overlap and complementarity exist between the two research streams. In this article, I compare and contrast a pair of exemplars from each stream - the information processing perspective and the social network perspective - with respect to their conceptualizations of organization structure and its relationship to performance. Several recommendations for future research that combines the two approaches are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analytics is an increasingly important source of competitive advantage. It has even been posited that big data will be the next strategic emphasis of organizations and that analytics capability will be manifested in organizational structure. In this article, I explore how analytics capability might be relected in organizational structure using the notion of "requisite organization" developed by Jaques (1998). requisite organization argues that a new strategic emphasis requires the addition of a new stratum in the organization, resulting in greater organizational complexity. requisite organization could serve as an objective, veriiable criterion for what qualiies as a genuine new strategic emphasis. Such a criterion is necessary for research on the co-evolution of strategy and structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]