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This paper attempts to bridge a gap between organizational economics and strategy research through an analysis of knowledge and communication in organizations. We argue that organizations emerge to achieve the intensive use of the knowledge that is acquired to perform specific tasks and to integrate dispersed knowledge that is embodied in different human minds. The attributes of the tasks undertaken determine the optimal acquisition and distribution of knowledge. Depending on the codifiability of knowledge, different communication modes arise as a coordination mechanism to deepen the division of labor, leverage managerial talent, and exploit the increasing returns to knowledge. Organizational processes can be adapted through codes and culture to facilitate coordination; organizational structure can be designed to complement the limitations of human ability. We stress that organizational process and structure construct the core of organizational capital, which generates rent and sustains organizational growth. From the analysis, we draw implications for the strategic management of knowledge and human resources in organizations.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the underlying mechanisms through which social media use for vertical and horizontal communication enhance employee performance. Design/methodology/approach To test the research model, the authors conducted a questionnaire survey in China. The authors used a customer panel database provided by a marketing research firm in China to identify appropriate respondents. Finally, the authors received 243 valid responses. Findings The authors find that social media use for vertical communication (SMUVC) is positively related to leader-member exchange (LMX) and social media use for horizontal communication (SMUHC) is positively related to team-member exchange (TMX). LMX and TMX are positively related to employee performance. LMX is positively associated with TMX. Besides, task complexity positively moderates the relationship between LMX and employee performance, while it negatively moderates the relationship between TMX and employee performance. Originality/value First, it adds to the literature by investigating the underlying mechanisms of how social media use for communication influences job performance. By identifying LMX and TMX as the underlying mechanisms, the authors make comprehensive considerations of how the vertical and horizontal relationships link the effect of social media use for communication on employee performance. Second, despite the growing evidence demonstrates that high-quality LMX and TMX can individually contribute to employee job performance, little research has considered both LMX and TMX relationships simultaneously and their effects on job performance. Finally, by establishing task complexity as a key moderator on the relationships between LMX and TMX and job performance, the study could explain the inconsistent findings in the literature that the effects of LMX and TMX are significant in some studies yet not significant in other studies.

This paper compares centralized and decentralized coordination when managers are privately informed and communicate strategically. We consider a multi-divisional organization in which decisions must be adapted to local conditions but also coordinated with each other. Information about local conditions is dispersed and held by self-interested division managers who communicate via cheap talk. The only available formal mechanism is the allocation of decision rights. We show that a higher need for coordination improves horizontal communication but worsens vertical communication. As a result, decentralization can dominate centralization even when coordination is extremely important relative to adaptation.

This study contributes to our understanding of leadership in public sector organizations by investigating the effect of organizational structure on the transformational leadership practices of municipal chief administrative officers. Using data from a national survey of senior managers in local government, the findings of this study suggest a number of possible explanations for why public sector organizations exhibit higher levels of transformational leadership than what scholars traditionally expect. Our findings suggest that the structure of these organizations may not be as bureaucratic as commonly believed and that some bureaucratic characteristics had little, if any, adverse affect on the prevalence or practice of transformational leadership behaviors. In particular, although organizational hierarchy and inadequate lateral/upward communication were associated with lower transformational leadership, no relationship was found between transformational leadership behaviors and two types of organizational red tape. Contrary to expectations in the mainstream leadership literature, however, the use of performance measurement by municipal organizations was associated with a significant increase in reported transformational leadership behaviors.

Purpose: The aim of this study is to examine the relationship that exists between business communication and business sustainability in uncertain times.   Theoretical framework: The study utilized the stakeholder theory which helps in explaining business sustainability in times of uncertainty and how it is influenced by different aspects such as communication.   Design/methodology/approach: The questionnaire was used to collect data was from a sample of 138 business owners or employees of SMEs in the manufacturing sector of Kozani Greece.   Findings: The results of this study shows that internal business communication has a positive effect on sustainability of a business during uncertain times. The results also show a positive effect of horizontal and external business communication on business sustainability during times of uncertainty. Since human interaction is the cornerstone of service providers' operations, this transfer assumes a great impact in business, most especially in the service industry. A sustainable strategy or plan must incorporate excellent communication. In order to effectively plan and consequently construct sustainability as well as sustainable plans, people must communicate themselves both internally as well as externally using the appropriate form(s) of communication. Therefore, managers in reputable organization ought to communicate with the receiver in a clear, direct, and accurate manner whether utilizing oral communication to enhance business continuity during times of uncertainty.   Research, Practical & Social implications: The results are of great importance to the field of business management especially concerning the relevance of business communication in supporting sustainability of businesses during crises or times of uncertainty.   Originality/value: The study provides is original knowledge on business communication in supporting sustainability during the different uncertain times.

Emerging hardware like non-volatile memory (NVM) and high-speed network interface cards are promising to improve the performance of matrix multiplication. However, a critical challenge in achieving high performance is the tradeoff between horizontal communication (data movement between processors) and vertical communication (data movement across memory hierarchies). In this paper, we provide an analysis in the distributed memory parallel model with additional consideration for communication between main memory and cache. We measure joint communication as the sum of the horizontal bandwidth and vertical bandwidth cost, and study the joint-communication cost of square matrix multiplication in the read-write symmetric setting (such as DRAM) and asymmetric setting (such as NVM). Specifically, we identify that in the symmetric setting, a joint-communication optimal algorithm can be directly obtained by combining the horizontally optimal and vertically optimal algorithms. We also identify that in the asymmetric setting, horizontal and vertical communications cannot be optimal at the same time, which means that there is a tradeoff between the two communications. In this case, we first present a joint-communication lower bound, and then we propose Joint-Communication Optimal Matrix Multiplication Algorithm (JOMMA), a parallel matrix multiplication algorithm whose joint-communication complexity meets the lower bound. The key idea behind JOMMA is to derive optimal matrix dimensions that each processor locally performs, which leads to determining the processor grid and an optimal schedule.

We consider organizations that optimally choose the level of adaptation to a changing environment when coordination among specialized tasks is a concern. Adaptive organizations provide employees with flexibility to tailor their tasks to local information. Coordination is maintained by limiting specialization and improving communication. Alternatively, by letting employees stick to some preagreed action plan, organizations can ensure coordination without communication, regardless of the extent of specialization. Among other things, our theory shows how extensive specialization results in organizations that ignore local knowledge, and it explains why improvements in communication technology may reduce specialization by pushing organizations to become more adaptive.

We use an innovative technique to examine an enduring but recently neglected question: How do environmental turbulence and complexity affect the appropriate formal design of organizations? We construct an agent-based simulation in which multidepartment firms with different designs face environments whose turbulence and complexity we control. The model’s results produce two sets of testable hypotheses. One set pinpoints formal designs that cope well with three different environments: turbulent settings, in which firms must improve their performance speedily; complex environments, in which firms must search broadly; and settings with both turbulence and complexity, in which firms must balance speed and search. The results shed new light on longstanding notions such as equifinality. The other set of hypotheses argues that the impact of individual design elements on speed and search often depends delicately on specific powers granted to department heads, creating effects that run contrary to conventional wisdom and intuition. Ample processing power at the bottom of a firm, for instance, can slow down the improvement and narrow the search of the firm as a whole. Differences arise between our results and conventional wisdom when conventional thinking fails to account for the powers of department heads—powers to withhold information about departmental options, to control decision-making agendas, to veto firmwide alternatives, and to take unilateral action. Our results suggest how future empirical studies of organizational design might be fruitfully coupled with rigorous agent-based modeling efforts.

This paper presents a Location-Allocation-Vehicle Routing Problem to design a humanitarian blood supply chain in response to earthquakes, incorporating quality concepts, reliability, and horizontal communication. The aim of the model is to minimize the total cost, minimize maximum shortage of demand points with high priority and low route value, and maximize the satisfaction of customers, including donors, hospitals, and blood transfusion centers. In order to deal with considerations of real world, the structure of the blood supply chain and all the intricacies incorporated in the model are defined based on the network and challenges of Blood Transfusion Center of Tehran. In addition, the blood demand and reliability of routes and facilities are considered uncertain, and the Interval Evidential Reasoning (IER) approach is used to handle the uncertainty. Since the problem is NP-hard, NSGAII and MOPSO algorithms have been applied to solve it. To demonstrate the efficiency of the model and compare the algorithms, several numerical examples in different sizes are designed. Finally, the most favorable algorithm is chosen for each size using the TOPSIS method.

Providing better communication and maximising the communication performance in a Underwater Wireless Sensor Network (UWSN) is always challenging due to the volatile characteristics of the underwater environment. Radio signals cannot properly propagate underwater, so there is a need for acoustic technology that can support better data rates and reliable underwater wireless communications. Node mobility, 3-D spaces and horizontal communication links are some critical challenges to the researcher in designing new routing protocols for UWSNs. In this paper, we have proposed a novel routing protocol called Layer by layer Angle-Based Flooding (L2-ABF) to address the issues of continuous node movements, end-to-end delays and energy consumption. In L2-ABF, every node can calculate its flooding angle to forward data packets toward the sinks without using any explicit configuration or location information. The simulation results show that L2-ABF has some advantages over some existing flooding-based techniques and also can easily manage quick routing changes where node movements are frequent.