Convergent Structural Elaboration: How Member Interactions Shape Structure as an Organization Scales

ABSTRACT As a firm grows, how do design decisions and employee interactions translate into structural change? We analyze archives of nearly 700,000 Slack interactions among members of a tech firm as it grew from 40 to 402 employees over 5 years. Building on extensive quantitative analyses, we suggest that structure elaborates through an integration of member interaction behavior and three core leader decisions. First, leaders’ adding new members to the organization couples with gradual growth in members’ responding to others’ posts, which we suggest as elaboration toward integrating effort. Second, leaders’ assigning people to various functional areas is associated with an uptick in members’ selecting interaction partners from within their areas, which we view as elaboration toward the grouping of members. Third, leaders’ allocating of the organization’s work among functional areas co-occurs with shifts in content of members’ interactions, which we consider indicates elaboration toward specializing the work performed. Building on theories of structuration and organizing, we introduce a process of convergent structural elaboration, wherein design decisions of leaders and interactions of members converge to change the de-facto organizational structure as a firm grows. Our methods offer opportunities for extensive new research, and our findings extend the literature on “joiners” and their influence on growing firms