Organizational Network Analysis Questionnaire

This questionnaire has two parts.

Part A is the participant-facing survey instrument: the roster questions you actually send to people to collect network data.

Part B is a readiness and ethics check for the practitioner, scored 1 (not ready) to 5 (ready). Complete Part B before sending Part A. ONA data is the most sensitive material in this collection, and a badly run ONA does lasting damage.

See organizational-network-analysis.

Evidence: Good as a method. Social network analysis is a mature, validated research methodology with robust organizational findings. The weaknesses are practical: response rates below roughly 70% make a map unreliable, and reported ties differ from actual ties.

Part B: Practitioner readiness check — do this first

B1. Purpose

Question: Can we state, in one sentence, the decision this data will inform?
- Rating (1–5): [ ]
Question: Would that decision genuinely change depending on the result?
- Rating (1–5): [ ]

Question: Will every participant be told what is collected, who sees it, how it is reported, and how long it is kept — before they answer?
- Rating (1–5): [ ]
Question: Is there a genuine opt-out with no consequence, and will non-participation be invisible to managers?
- Rating (1–5): [ ]

B3. Reporting boundaries

Question: Have we committed in writing that no individual-level map will be shown to any manager about their own reports?
- Rating (1–5): [ ]
Question: Have we committed that this data will never be used in performance, promotion, or redundancy decisions?
- Rating (1–5): [ ]

B4. Method

Question: Are we using a consented survey rather than passive analysis of email, chat, or calendar data?
- Rating (1–5): [ ]
Question: Do we expect a response rate above 70%? Below that, the map is unreliable and should not be presented as one.
- Rating (1–5): [ ]

B5. Data handling

Question: Are retention period, storage location, deletion date, and applicable regime (GDPR/UK GDPR, HIPAA, works council or union agreements) all settled?
- Rating (1–5): [ ]

Any B2 or B3 item scoring below 5 stops the exercise. These are not trade-offs; they are preconditions. See od-ethics.

Part A: The participant survey

Introduce it with the exact confidentiality terms agreed in Part B. Then ask only the networks you will actually use — each additional network multiplies burden and lowers response rate.

Suggested cap: three networks, five names each.

A1. Information network

Question: Who do you go to for the information you need to do your job? Name up to five people.

A2. Advice and expertise network

Question: Whose technical or professional judgment do you seek when you are stuck? Name up to five people.

A3. Trust network

Question: Who would you tell about a mistake you had made, before it became public? Name up to five people.

This is usually the smallest network, the least like the org chart, and the most predictive of whether a change will take hold. It is also the most sensitive. Only ask it if Part B scored clean.

A4. Energy network (optional)

Question: Who do you come away from an interaction with feeling more motivated and capable? Name up to five people.

A5. Innovation network (optional)

Question: Who do you talk to when you have a half-formed idea? Name up to five people.

A6. Friction items (optional, scored)

Question: I can easily find out who knows what in this organization.
- Rating (1–5): [ ]
Question: When I need something from another team, I know who to ask.
- Rating (1–5): [ ]
Question: I have the connections I need to do my job well.
- Rating (1–5): [ ]

Step C: Analysis

Report patterns and roles. Do not report named rankings unless the named person has agreed.

Central connectors — high in-degree. Often not senior, often overloaded, often invisible to leadership. Check their workload before celebrating them, and check whether the organization has accidentally made one person a bottleneck.
Brokers and boundary spanners — the people connecting otherwise separate clusters. Removing one disconnects parts of the organization. These are the highest-value and most under-recognized people in most networks. Find out whether their brokering is in their job description; usually it is not.
Silos — dense internal ties, sparse external ties. Predicts handoff failures precisely at the boundary. Compare against your system or service boundaries; the correspondence is usually uncomfortable. See conways-law.
Peripheral nodes — weakly connected. Distinguish the three causes before acting: new joiners still connecting, deep specialists who are fine, and people quietly disengaging. Do not assume the third.
Bus factor — any single node whose removal disconnects a cluster is a risk register item, not just a network observation.
Compare the trust network to the org chart. The gap between them is the single most useful output of an ONA, and the one most likely to change how leadership plans a change programme.
Recruit early adopters from the map, not from the hierarchy. Change spreads through respected connectors. See rogers-diffusion-of-innovations.
Report a response rate with every map. Below 70%, say plainly that the map is indicative and not reliable, every time it is presented. Attractive network diagrams invite over-interpretation.
Delete the raw ties on the agreed date. Then say publicly that you have.