Coordination of Expertise: A Qualitative Study of Organizational Structures and Visibility

Abstract

This study examines how the coordination of expertise develops across phases of organizational change, and what happens to it when the structures that sustained it are dissolved. Drawing on a qualitative single-case study of an internal expert department within a large Swedish bank, the study traces coordination conditions across three organizational phases through 18 semi-structured interviews with employees and first-line managers. The analysis draws primarily on Bechky's (2006) role-based coordination framework, supplemented by Monteiro's (2024) account of how organizational structures shape the visibility of expertise and Freedman et al.'s (2024) work on the emotional consequences of communicative asymmetry. The findings show that the department successfully assembled the conditions for role-based coordination, producing measurable performance gains, but that these conditions were never made legible to the organizational levels making strategic decisions. When the department was dissolved, specialist competence was redistributed but the coordination infrastructure that had made it useful was not transferred, recreating the original coordination problem at a different scale. The study proposes that organizational ghosting operates at two causally connected levels simultaneously. At the structural level, expertise becomes invisible when the coordination infrastructure that sustained it is removed without transfer. At the emotional level, employees are ghosted when strategic decisions are communicated without the reciprocal dialogue that would allow them to make sense of what has happened. The structural invisibility enables the communicative asymmetry, and the communicative asymmetry produces the emotional experience.