“Managing Errors” in the Perception of Workplace Social Networks: The Case of Workplace Cooperation

Abstract

Exchanging help with one’s coworkers is essential to survive the demands and pressures of modern organizational life. But individuals have a limited amount of resources to trade for others and thus necessitate to identify reliable exchange partners with whom the exchange can be beneficial. At the same time, individuals have reputations for cooperation to protect that they need to consider in deciding whether and to what extent they should make themselves and their resources available to colleagues. I argue that these evaluations are informed by the structure of the informal exchanges as the individual perceives it, and I examine the consequences of perceptions that over- versus under-estimate the presence of ties within the structure. I argue that the costs of these two errors are asymmetrical such as for certain outcomes one error is more costly than the other. In particular, I argue that errors of underestimation are more costly in terms of status and reputation as an exchange partner, and that which type of error is more costly for job performance depends on the level of resource dependence of the individual. Overall, this work points to a thus far unrecognized source of advantage in network perceptions: the asymmetric costs of alternative errors. I conclude with a discussion of the theoretical implications of this new line of research and its practical implications.