Losing Touch: Balancing Cohesion & Efficiency During Management Transitions

Abstract

This study concerns contingencies in losing ties. Our setting is three professional service firms where we examine changes in relations of recently promoted service professionals (auditors, consultants, and lawyers). Our focus is on tie loss. We take a comprehensive look at driving factors, examining qualities of the alter, the relationship, and social structure. Each contributes to predicating change, but revealing an overarching tendency for balance between cohesion and efficiency logics. Newly promoted professionals will avoid losing high-status contacts (H1), but they don’t shed contacts of any rank who bring multiplex resources (H2). They are less likely to lose contacts they trust (H3, H4) and especially embedded ties (H5), but they also pursue efficiency, shedding the most redundant relations (H6). Finally, we parse out the role of different types of trust on structurally redundant contacts by showing that a high level of cognitive trust in one’s extant network facilitates the letting go of redundant ties (H7) while a high level of emotional trust hinders the shedding of ties (H8).