Abstract
Social status, defined as the relative rank or position that an individual holds in a social hierarchy, is known to be among the most important motivating forces in social behaviors. In this paper, we consider the notion of status from the perspective of a position or title held by a person in an enterprise. We study the intersection of social status and social networks in an enterprise. We study whether enterprise communication logs can help reveal how social interactions and individual status manifest themselves in social networks. To that end, we use two enterprise datasets with three communication channels — voice call, short message, and email — to demonstrate the social-behavioral differences among individuals with different status. We have several interesting findings and based on these findings we also develop a model to predict social status. On the individual level, high-status individuals are more likely to be spanned as structural holes by linking to people in parts of the enterprise networks that are otherwise not well connected to one another. On the community level, the principle of homophily, social balance and clique theory generally indicate a “rich club” maintained by high-status individuals, in the sense that this community is much more connected, balanced and dense. Our model can predict social status of individuals with 93% accuracy.
Highlights
Social status refers to the relative rank that an individual holds in a society [1, 2]
We indicate the relative ranks of users in the company as their social status, i.e., managers (M) as high status and subordinates (S) as low status (Please see Materials and Methods for additional details about the data)
We find that managers use mobile phones or emails more frequently than their subordinates
Summary
Social status refers to the relative rank (or position) that an individual holds in a society [1, 2]. An indicator of status in an enterprise setting could be the position that an individual holds in the company; and an indicator of status in a social media (such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.) could be the number of ‘followers’ ‘friends’ one has. Apart from economic incentive, social status is known to be among the important motivating forces in social behaviors [3], and achieving a higher status in a social network is often a motivating force in influencing an individual’s behavior [4, 5]. An individual with higher status is likely to have more influence or control on the message, mission, or vision within a social system.
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