The way e-mail’s used says a lot about a company’s culture. But can e-mail patterns tell you when a company’s about to go belly-up?

Yes, according to researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology. They recently conducted a study of e-mail records at Enron in the months leading up to the company’s demise. Here’s what they found:

The researchers looked at the number of “active e-mail cliques” — meaning groups in which every member has had direct e-mail contact with every other member — at the company. A month before Enron went under, the number of cliques jumped from 100 to almost 800. Also, messages within those groups became more frequent but were sent to employees outside the group less often, the New Scientist reports.

The researchers say it’s a characteristic behavior in organizations experiencing a crisis — employees speak more often with co-workers they know, and withhold information from those they don’t.

“Human resources folks would probably find this extremely useful,” says Gilbert Peterson of the Air Force Institute of Technology in Dayton, Ohio, which has also studied Enron’s e-mails.

But will this hold true at all workplaces? Enron’s a pretty special case, and what happened there may not be indicative of what would happen at other companies.

And there are probably easier ways to sniff out discontent among employees than a complex analysis of their e-mail habits.

Tags: e-mail, Enron