Social Network and Organizational Performance: Effect of Community Coalitions on the Effectiveness in Delivering Substance Abuse Prevention Program

This study applied social network analysis to the study of organizational effectiveness in organizing drug use prevention programs in communities. We examined the association between structural properties of naturally-occurring relations of coalition's communication network and the organizational effectiveness that consists of four scales of organizational functioning, data-based planning, benchmark achievement, and prevention activity progress. We surveyed 415 coalition leaders in 24 communities about their attitudes and practices toward substance drug prevention programs (in 2001). Network structure was measured by asking leaders to whom they go for advice about prevention programs, with whom they discuss prevention issues, and with whom they were friends. For each community, we calculated network-level measures of density, reciprocity, and degree-, closeness-, and betweenness-based centralizations (an index of distribution inequality in social networks) from three relations. Then, we computed pair-wise correlation coefficients between these network measures and four scales of organizational effectiveness. The results showed in-closeness centralization was positively associated with organizational performance for both advice and friend relations. These results indicate that coalition networks where information (about prevention programs) only has to travel a short distance to arrive at a few leaders had more effective performance. The implication is that greater heterogeneity in structural positions of prominence among coalition leaders would lead to greater organizational effectiveness in drug prevention programs that take advantage of naturalistic relationships in coalition networks.