People’s Talk Makes Things Happen: Member Interactions Energize Structural Changes in a Growing Organization

There is a longstanding interest in the development of new ventures, but little is known about how the design and structure of young firms grow and change as the firm grows. We propose and explore that various changes in patterns and content of member interactions correspond with changes in the structure of a growing firm. We examine this idea with quantitative inductive analyses of nearly 700,000 messages, sent on the Slack platform, by members of a hi-tech firm as it grew from 40 to 402 employees over 5 years. We use big data quantitative tools to analyze and identify trends in the data and use inductive analyses to suggest theory about the interface of leader behaviors, employee interaction behaviors and structural changes. Our theory suggests three core arguments: First, as leaders add new members to the organization, we show gradual growth in member responding to other people, which we infer to be an increase in interactions (rather than “mere” statements) that serve to an integration of member efforts. Second, as leaders assign people to various areas, we show a lagging but clear uptick in tendency of members to select interaction partners from within their functional area, which we suggest shows members’ interactions as gradual drivers of the structural grouping of members. Third, as leaders allocate the organization’s work among functional areas, we see a (partial, incomplete, yet clear) distinction between different functional areas in the content of interactions, suggesting an emerging division of labor, or a focus in the types of work different areas perform. Taken together, our theory suggests a process of convergent structural elaboration of growing firms, wherein design decisions of leaders and the interactions of members converge over time constructing the structures through which organizational work is accomplished.