The Effects of Promotion on Tie Formation and Decay across Team and Rank Boundaries

Abstract

This study investigates how promotion affects tie formation and decay across team and rank boundaries in an organization. It also investigates the moderating roles of Machiavellian personality in the relationship between promotion and inter-team tie formation and decay. Online survey data were collected in two time points from 566 employees of a Korean chemical company. The results from negative binomial regressions generally confirm our hypotheses that promotion would be significantly related to inter-team tie formation and decay of newly promoted employees with both higher-and lower-rank employees, but not to intra-team social network changes. The results also confirm the positive and significant moderating effect of Machiavellian personality on the relationship between promotion and inter-team tie formation with higher-rank employees. These results are robust to different specification tests. Overall, this study suggests that newly promoted employees tend to conserve the total amount of social networks, by forming new social ties and decaying existing ties at the same time, and they do so partly with instrumental motivations.