Identifying informal communities and leaders for total quality management using network analysis of email

Global communication networks with internet and email have changed the nature of community and leadership communication style within an organization. For TQM-based organizational innovation, it is a key issue to identify communities of practice and deploy adequate leaders within the communities in the global communication. For effective TQM activities with leadership, we propose a method for indentifying informal communities and potential leaders from email data. In a clustering process, we have detected informal communities and hierarchical structures. Network centrality characterizes members of the informal communities within the structure of the email network. These measures contributed to identify leadership roles with the informal communities. According to the results of a case-study with actual email data of a firm, we discuss how our method can be applied for TQM-based organizational management that could lead to innovation.