Intra-Organizational Social Networks: Integration in Multinational Organizations in Brazil

The purpose of this paper is to analyze cross-functional integration in six organizations located in Brazil, using network analysis. These industrial companies were selected because of their efforts focused on cross-functional integration between functions and activities related to balancing demand and supply. Co-occurrences between different dyadic, triadic and quadratic cross- functional groups, and their primary integration activities were defined. The data was quantitatively analyzed using Gephi, a network analysis tool. The function-activity co-occurrence measurements are the elements of the weighted adjacency matrix. The minimum spanning tree optimization was applied to obtain the structure with the most relevant function-activity co- occurrences. Many structural aspects of the different groups and organizations were identified, and then the descriptive qualitative results were used to help better explain the network structure. Building on the different levels of analyses, the findings here suggest ...