Asymmetries in organizational structures

Relationships in organizational structures are frequently asymmetric (e.g., the number of e-mail messages that an employee sends to a colleague is usually different from the number of e-mail messages he received from that colleague). So organizational data are usually represented by asymmetric square matrices that cannot be analyzed by standard symmetric approaches. For this reason methods based on Singular Value Decomposition and Asymmetric Multidimensional Scaling were proposed to analyze these types of matrices. In many situations information concerning hierarchies or aggregations in the organizational structure is available and can be used in the analysis of the data (e.g., professional levels or departments belonging). In this paper three-way unfolding is proposed to take into consideration this additional information and applied to Krackhardt(1987) data on advice-giving and getting in an organization.