Identifying Key Contributors to Performance in Organizations: The Case for Knowledge-Based Measures

Understanding the relative criticality of employees is important in managing turnover and security risks associated with human capital in organizations. Traditional social network analysis measures are based on static, survey-based assessments of centrality and other sociometric aspects of organizations, limiting their effectiveness in fully evaluating human capital criticality, particularly criticality that may be “hidden” in the non-social dimensions of an organization. We introduce new taskand knowledge-based measures designed to overcome such limitations, and we apply them to a sixteen-person software development team to compare their efficacy to that of traditional social network measures of degree and betweenness centrality. Our results suggest that while each class of measures provides useful insight on criticality of organization actors, knowledge-based measures provide the most robust predictions of each actor’s contribution to organizational performance.