PERF RMANCE 04 - The Performance Portal - Ernst & Young

Boundary-spanning and helpseeking
behaviors
The idea of building a “connected
enterprise“ seems a commonsense
goal. The study of connectivity in large
organizations follows a long tradition of
academic and management scholarship. In
his landmark 1973 article, “The strength
of weak ties,” sociologist Mark Granovetter
observed the extent to which bi-directional
communication taking place between two
colleagues is indicative of the strength of
their social ties to one another. He argued
that weak ties, represented by infrequent
interactions among peers, had significant
value for organizations as they formed a
channel for the exchange of information.
Granovetter linked weak ties directly to
cohesion among peers and saw the analysis
of social ties as a way to highlight valueproducing
relations between groups.
In his 1992 book Structural holes: The
social structure of competition, theorist
Ronald S. Burt argued that two people
who provide novel and non-redundant
information in a social structure represent
holes in the social network — and that
the spanning of these structural holes
provides the mechanism relating weak
ties to positive outcomes. In Burt’s theory,
“The value a manager adds to a firm
is his or her ability to coordinate other
people: identifying opportunities to add
value within an organization and getting
the right people together to develop the
opportunities. Knowing who, when, and
how to coordinate is a function of the
manager's network of contacts within
and beyond the firm” (1997). Thus, the
value of employees within an organization
largely lies in the contacts that they
develop over time.
These well-functioning ties can translate
into more efficient operations via improved
information flows; one clear example of
which can be found in “help-seeking”
behaviors within the enterprise.
In his 2010 book Enterprise 2.0,
MIT research scientist Andrew McAfee
describes an employee at a large
firm, searching for someone who can
do the following:
“. . . keep her from reinventing the wheel,
answer her pressing questions, point her
to exactly the right resource, tell her about
a really good vendor or consultant, let her
know that they were working on a similar
problem and had made some encouraging
progress, or perform any of the other
scores of helpful activities that flow from a
well-functioning tie.” (McAfee 2010)