Abstract
Using data from 138 independent samples, we meta-analytically examined three research questions concerning the roles of personality and network position in organizations. First, how do different personality characteristics—self-monitoring and the Big Five personality traits—relate to indegree centrality and brokerage, the two most studied structurally advantageous positions in organizational networks? Second, how do indegree centrality and brokerage compare in explaining job performance and career success? Third, how do these personality variables and network positions relate to work outcomes? Our results show that self-monitoring predicted indegree centrality (across expressive and instrumental networks) and brokerage (in expressive networks) after controlling for the Big Five traits. Self-monitoring, therefore, was especially relevant for understanding why people differ in their acquisition of advantageous positions in social networks. But the total variance explained by personality ranged between 3% and 5%. Surprisingly, we found that indegree centrality was more strongly related to job performance and career success than brokerage. We also found that personality predicted job performance and career success above and beyond network position and that network position partially mediated the effects of certain personality variables on work outcomes. This paper provides an integrated view of how an individual’s personality and network position combine to influence job performance and career success.
Highlights
According to theories of structural advantage, people benefit from occupying advantageous network positions that provide access to useful knowledge, career sponsorship, and psychosocial support (Brass 1984, Burt 1992, Seibert et al 2001)
What effects does personality have on network structure? Second, how do indegree centrality and brokerage, the two network positions most frequently associated with structural advantage, compare in predicting performance and career success? The third is a two-part question concerning the integration of personality and social network position: (i) Once social network position is taken into account, do personality characteristics contribute to the explanation of individuals’ performance and career success? And (ii) does network position mediate the relationship between personality and work outcomes?
Our research addresses a new challenge to the integration of personality psychology and social networks in examining the recent claim (Burt 2012) that, irrespective of the degree to which personality characteristics influence the attainment of advantageous network positions, the position a person occupies in the social network is the most substantive predictor of performance
Summary
According to theories of structural advantage, people benefit from occupying advantageous network positions that provide access to useful knowledge, career sponsorship, and psychosocial support (Brass 1984, Burt 1992, Seibert et al 2001). Theory and research on social networks emphasize that central network positions provide access to information and other resources and thereby enhance the likelihood that individuals will achieve performance and career success (for reviews, see Burt et al 2013, Kilduff and Brass 2010). Existing research suggests that self-monitoring and the Big Five traits influence people’s attainment of indegree centrality and brokerage positions (e.g., Klein et al 2004, Mehra et al 2001, Oh and Kilduff 2008, Sasovova et al 2010). Big Five) and advantageous network positions (indegree centrality and brokerage) predict job performance and career success when taking each other’s effects into account and (b) whether the effects of personality on performance outcomes are mediated by the attainment of structurally advantageous network positions. Our metaanalysis, which takes into account primary studies across the personality and network literatures, examines both direct effects and potential mediation relationships
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