Measuring boundary-spanning

Post date: Nov 18, 2015 11:38:39 PM

As you know, people in organizations often play the important role of brokerage -- i.e., serving to connect otherwise unconnected people. Sometimes these people are in the same department or division as the broker and as each other, but sometimes not. Given that people can belong to different groups, there are five possible brokerage roles.

• Coordinator. These are brokers that connect people within the same unit as each other and as the broker.

• Representative. These are brokers that pass along information coming from inside their group to people outside their group

• Gatekeepers. These are brokers that take in information from outside their group and pass it along to others within their group.

• Consultants. These are brokers that connect people who are in the same group, but not the same group as the broker. The broker is an outsider serving as a mediator.

• Liaisons. These are brokers that connect people who are in different groups from each other, and also from themselves.

To obtain measures of how often each person plays each of these five roles, you can run Networks|Ego networks|Gould & Fernandez Brokerage. You fill out the form like this:

In the example, lex-required is the network of workflow ties and lexattr is a dataset containing attributes of each person. Over on the right I've selected Department as the attribute. The output, in part, consists of the number of times that each person plays each of the five roles:

Un-normalized Brokerage Scores

1 2 3 4 5 6

Coordinat Gatekeepe Represent Consultan Liaison Total

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75 350 | 0 4 0 0 3 7 |

37 171 | 1 10 7 2 35 55 |

13 56 | 0 7 8 2 60 77 |

63 298 | 4 22 19 2 67 114 |

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As you can see, the person with id 350 rarely serves as a broker (just 7 times). When they do, it is either as a gatekeeper (receiving from outside and sending inside) or a liaison (connecting three different departments, including their own).