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

That’s what researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology say in a recent report. They looked at e-mail records at Enron in the months leading up to the company’s demise. Here’s what they found:

A month before the collapse, the number of “active e-mail cliques” — defined as groups in which every member has had direct e-mail contact with every other member — jump from about 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 with those they don’t.

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

Some problems, though: 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: crisis, e-mail. Enron