This article (Leadership networks in Catholic parishes: Implications for implementation research in health) presents differing social networks of two parishes’ leadership structures: Sacred Heart and Holy Cross. The former parish is run by an order and the latter by a diocese. What I found interesting is the clearly distinct difference in distributed leadership vs. leader-centred frameworks respectively by analyzing the collaboration networks of each parish. Evidently, Sacred Heart is shown to have almost complete density of collaboration between their leaders with a density of 0.96 (Fig 1.1); whereas, Holy Cross has a density of 0.65 (Fig 1.2).
Although the sparsity of collaboration in comparison to Sacred Heart would usually indicate less communication overall, the strength of the ties are also taken into consideration. They define strong ties as collaboration on either a daily, weekly, or monthly basis and weak ties on an annual basis. The Strong Triadic Closure property is evidently present in the networks; in fact, all the nodes are a part of a single cluster for each. Despite the stark difference in collaboration density, their corresponding discussion networks have similar density with Sacred Heart having 0.68 and Holy Cross having 0.66. This is, at least in part, due to the proportion of strong ties in Holy Cross’ collaboration network being higher than Sacred Heart’s; clearly, it is significant enough to affect the flow needed to transmit information across the leadership members. They note that ties between leaders at Holy Cross were more likely to be strong, either daily or weekly. This seems to imply an inverse relationship between the necessity of frequent communication and required ties for flow of information.
It seems there is a trade off between the centrality of the ordained leaders and increasing the capacity of the parish to organize programs. This naturally follows from the necessity of additional leadership responsibilities being dispersed to lighten the duties from any single person. At Sacred Heart we see that the three most central leaders in the collaboration network are not ordained but rather religious or laity (Fig 2.1). In contrast, two of the three most central leaders at Holy Cross are ordained (Fig 2.2). To compute the centrality they used flow betweenness centrality which not only accounts for shortest paths but all possible paths. This grants a more accurate depiction of the flow of information however this was likely only possible due to the small sample size; with a larger set of nodes, computing the flow betweenness centrality would be too costly.
Making use of social network analysis has proven to be a useful method of discovering the key members that would be able to share and implement programs. However, it also uncovers some trade offs that should be considered for leadership responsibilities in a parish.
Reference
Negrón, R., Leyva, B., Allen, J., Ospino, H., Tom, L., & Rustan, S. (2014). Leadership networks in Catholic parishes: Implications for implementation research in health. Social Science & Medicine, 122, 53-62. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.10.012
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953614006583