Evolution, Structure and Users' Attachment Behavior in Enterprise Social Networks

Due to the increasing number of organizations who have started to implement Enterprise Social Networks (ESN), their network structure, which is invoked by the users and interactions among them, has gained increasing attention, both by practitioners and researchers. However, prior research has not considered how the network structure of ESN evolves over time through interactions among users. To address this lack in research we investigated two research questions: (1) How do the topological characteristics of ESN evolve in time? (2) How is users' attachment behavior characterized with respect to the creation of social relationships during the evolution of ESN? Drawing on a rich dataset comprising more than 4 years of networking and interactions, we are able to show that ESN do not evolve randomly but follow preferential attachment. Rather, our findings indicate a significant, positive correlation between users' centrality in the network and their number of new social relationships.