Who matters to shared psychological climate perceptions? An investigation of social network tie types and attributes

Abstract

Psychological climate perceptions are related to important employee attitudes and behaviors, yet our knowledge of how such perceptions develop is relatively limited. Building upon work that has found that employees’ interaction with coworkers influences similarity in employees’ psychological climate perceptions, we focus on how network ties (advice, friendship) and their attributes (trust, expertise) are related to shared psychological climate perceptions. We use social information processing theory to argue that employees who have friendship and advice ties characterized by high levels of trust and expertise will have similar perceptions of the psychological climate. Using social network data from 61 employees in an information technology organization, we find that employees have psychological climate perceptions similar to those of friends whom they perceive to have high levels of trustworthiness and expertise, but not to those of low-trust or low-expertise friendship ties or advice ties. Our results challenge the notion that interaction in and of itself shapes psychological climate perceptions and instead suggest that certain ties with certain attributes are more important. In addition, we bring a sociological perspective into the highly ‘psychologized’ human resource management literature and contribute to social network research exploring social influence.