Abstract
To create social ties to support their professional or personal goals, people actively engage in instrumental networking. Drawing from moral psychology research, we posit that this intentional behavior has unintended consequences for an individual’s morality. Unlike personal networking in pursuit of emotional support or friendship, and unlike social ties that emerge spontaneously, instrumental networking in pursuit of professional goals can impinge on an individual’s moral purity — a psychological state that results from viewing the self as clean from a moral standpoint — and make an individual feel dirty. We theorize that such feelings of dirtiness decrease the frequency of instrumental networking and, as a result, work performance. We also examine sources of variability in networking-induced feelings of dirtiness by proposing that the amount of power people have when they engage in instrumental networking influences how dirty this networking makes them feel. Three laboratory experiments and a survey study of lawyers in a large North American law firm provide support for our predictions. We call for a new direction in network research that investigates how network-related behaviors associated with building social capital influence individuals’ psychological experiences and work outcomes.
Highlights
As much as networking is an important task, it sometimes has a negative connotation
We further investigate sources of variability in networkinginduced feelings of dirtiness and propose that the amount of power people have when they engage in instrumental networking for professional goals influences how dirty such networking can make them feel
It is possible that the correlation between power and feelings of dirtiness is endogenous, with people potentially achieving higher rank because they feel less dirty than others when they engage in instrumental networking
Summary
As much as networking is an important task, it sometimes has a negative connotation. The term sometimes conjures up images of back-slapping, forced smiles, awkward conversations or brown-nosing, and because of these negative undertones, many people shy away from becoming actively engaged in the process. Structural determinism assumes that a person’s position in the social structure—her relatively stable patterns of social relationships—is a main determinant of her outcomes, such as access to resources, wellbeing, and performance According to this view, the constraints and opportunities created by the social structure leave little room for individual choice in determining behavior. Social networking refers to the building and nurturing of personal and professional relationships to create a system of information, contacts, and support thought to be crucial for career and personal success (Whiting and de Janasz, 2004). Such active networking is relevant to organizations, as networking within (internal networking) or beyond organizational boundaries. The approach used to create a tie may be instrumental: the person initiating the social relationship may do so proactively and with a specific goal of obtaining benefits (e.g., advancement) and individual advantage; in others, the approach may be spontaneous: the social tie may emerge naturally, with no premeditated purpose, and may be initiated by another person (Bourdieu, 1985; Wellman and Berkowitz, 1988)
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