Challenges in the organizational network analysis : a data collection process perspective

Abstract

PURPOSE: Organizational network analysis is usually a long and complex process, consisting of many steps and generally using many analytical tools.

DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: Numerous papers have been written about the analysis itself, especially about network measures, concepts, and visualizations used in research. This is unfortunately not the case for the data collection process.

FINDINGS: The practice of conducting research shows that effective data collection is often a barrier to network analysis in organizations. The current situation related to COVID-19 has become an additional difficulty in assessing the occurrence of relationships between employees based on observations.

PRACTICAL IMPLEMENTATIONS: An analysis of the literature and especially years of conducted studies in different organizations show that researchers still lack deeper insights into that kind of issue, such as identifying the main challenges and potential ways to improve the data collection process. This is a research gap we strive to address within this paper.

ORIGINALITY/VALUE: In the addition to the effort made towards structuring the entire process of data collection in the organizational network analysis research contribution of this paper include our proposals of potential improvements that could be made to the data collection process in analyzing organizational networks.