Social Network Perspective Research Articles

Time for Change: A Dynamic Perspective of Employee Social Networks

Organizational social networks are dynamic systems that continuously emerge and evolve. The stability and change in social networks among employees, project teammates, and job applicants have important implications for organizations and the people in them. Much of the emerging organizational literature on network dynamics can be interpreted through the lens of the microfoundations of social networks, which drills down to basic factors that shape network evolution and dynamics. Building on and extending this stream of research, papers in this symposium shed light on issues of theoretical and practical importance, including the creation and retention of professional networks among job seekers, the formation and retention of idea sharing ties among employees, the dynamics of conflict roles in project teams, and the impact of increasing communication delay on network connectivity in instrumental and expressive team networks over time. Creation and Retention of Newcomers’ Professional Networks: Coevolution with Professional Knowledge Presenter: Xuan Liu; U. of Minnesota - Twin Cities Presenter: Yihao Liu; U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Formation and Retention of Idea Sharing Ties: Formal Work Relationships and Creative Role Identity Presenter: Yifan Song; Texas A&M U. Presenter: Dan Ni; School of Business, Sun Yat-sen U. Presenter: Le Zhou; U. of Minnesota Presenter: Xiaoming Zheng; Tsinghua U. Characters on the stage of intragroup conflict: An illumination of conflict role dynamics Presenter: Amanda Ferguson; Northern Illinois U. Presenter: Stephen L. Jones; U. of Washington, Bothell Presenter: Randall S Peterson; London Business School Presenter: Pri Pradhan Shah; U. of Minnesota The Impact of Communication Delay on Team Network Connectivity Presenter: Dorothy R. Carter; Michigan State U. Presenter: Aaron Schecter; U. of Georgia Presenter: Jacob Pendergraft; U. of Georgia Presenter: Joshua Pearman; U. of Georgia

Network Community, Institutional Development, and Firm Performance

Conventional wisdom in network research attributes superior firm performance to social connectedness. However, a high degree of connectedness is not necessarily beneficial if the connections are not dependable. Drawing on a relational embeddedness perspective, this study examines the effect of network connections through communities on firm performance. Firms differ in the extent to which they are affiliated across overlapping network communities. Our goal is to investigate whether and how network community affiliations affect firm performance. Leveraging recent advances in community detection technology, our analyses of 15,767 firm-year observations from the Chinese venture capital industry suggest that community-affiliated firms are likely to perform better than non-community-affiliated firms, especially in regions with less developed institutions. Importantly, we find an inverted U-shaped relationship indicating that firm performance improves with community affiliations up to a certain threshold, after which the costs of multiple affiliations outweigh the benefits. The more developed the local institutions where firms operate, the earlier the turning point is reached. By integrating social network and institutional perspectives, this study highlights not only the promises but also the limits of community affiliations in affecting firm performance.

Exploring Leadership Through Social Networks: The Next Frontier

As conceptualizations of leadership have shifted to embrace the relational, multilevel, and co-constructed nature of leadership, perspectives that incorporate social networks have garnered increasing attention from scholars and practitioners alike. This increasing prevalence of social network approaches in the leadership literature has challenged researchers to change the way they understand and examine leadership. Accordingly, this shift has come with additional complexities in terms of measurement and analysis. Thus, there remain critical issues in both theorizing about and empirically examining leadership from a network perspective that must be addressed to capitalize on the potential strengths of social networks for advancing a relational, contextual, and multilevel understanding of leadership. This panel symposium session aims to propel this mission by focusing on three key goals: 1) highlighting the benefits of a network-based perspectives for advancing leadership theory and methods, 2) clarifying the challenges of employing various types of social network models in the study of leadership, and 3) identifying where leadership and networks research needs to improve and advance in order to continue answering important organizational questions. To do so, we have brought together an esteemed group of panelists to address these questions and provide additional insights to advance the science and practice of social network perspectives of leadership. Their combined expertise will not only provide the audience with a view into state- of-the-art science on leadership and networks, but will also introduce rich insights into the future of social network approaches to leadership.

Investigating the Influence of Social Media on Employee Creativity: A Perspective from Social Network Ties

ABSTRACT Despite the growing body of research on social media and its effects on employees, few studies have sought to explain the aims of social media users in firms and the mechanisms that link these to employee creativity. From the perspective of social networks, this study argues that using social media for work and social purposes in an enterprise fosters instrumental and expressive links among employees, which in turn fosters employee creativity. The role of instrumental and expressive social ties as mediators was investigated in this study. Furthermore, this research proposes that tie strength moderates the relationship between instrumental and expressive ties and employee creativity. We reveal that specific types of social media usage, such as work- and social-related usage, lead to employees’ instrumental and expressive ties, which promote employee creativity, using a sample of 325 Chinese employees. Furthermore, in our model, an employee’s tie strength serves as a second-stage moderator. The findings of this study substantiated most of our hypotheses which also had important theoretical and practical implications and guided scholars in the proper direction for further research.

The effects of online reviews on the popularity of user-generated design ideas within the Lego community

PurposeThis study aims to explore how online reviews and users’ social network centrality interact to influence idea popularity in open innovation communities (OICs).Design/methodology/approachThis study used Python to obtain data from the LEGO Innovation Community. In total, 285,849 reviews across 4,475 user designs between March 2019 and March 2021 were extracted to test this study’s hypotheses.FindingsThe ordinary least square regression analysis results show that review volume, review valence, review variance and review length all positively influence idea popularity. In addition, users’ in-degree centrality positively interacts with review valence, review variance and review length to influence idea popularity, while their out-degree centrality negatively interacts with such effects.Research limitations/implicationsDrawing on the interactive marketing perspective, this study employs a large sample from the LEGO community and examines user design and idea popularity from a community member’s point of view. Moreover, this study is the first to confirm the role of online reviews and user network centrality in influencing idea popularity in OICs from a social network perspective. Furthermore, by integrating social network analysis and persuasion theories, this study confirms the interaction effects of review characteristics and users’ social network centrality on idea popularity.Practical implicationsThis study’s results highlight that users should actively interact and share with reviewers their professional product design knowledge and/or the journey of their design to improve the volume of reviews on their user designs. Moreover, users could also draw more attention from other users by actively responding to heterogeneous reviews. In addition, users should be cautious with the number of people they follow and ensure that they improve their in-degree rather than out-degree centrality in their social networks.Originality/valueThis study integrates social network analysis and persuasion theories to explore the effects of online reviews and users’ centrality on idea popularity in OICs, a vital research issue that has been overlooked.

Teachers Supporting Teachers: A Social Network Perspective on Collegial Stress Support and Emotional Wellbeing Among Elementary and Middle School Educators.

School mental health practitioners and researchers are increasingly concerned about educator job-related stress and its implications for teacher burnout, teaching efficacy, turnover, and student outcomes. Educators’ collegial networks in their schools are natural resources for stress support, yet little is known about the extent to which educators seek support from their colleagues in managing their stress and whether these relationships promote their emotional wellbeing. Utilizing peer nomination and self-report data from 370 educators in 17 elementary and middle schools, we found patterns in whom educators nominated as a source of stress support. Specifically, educators more often nominated colleagues who worked in the same role, grade, and/or subject, and those similar in age and who had similar or more experience. Furthermore, men and educators of color more often nominated same-gender and same-race colleagues, respectively, whereas these trends were not observed for women or White educators. However, the prevalence of these characteristics among colleagues nominated as a source of stress support was not often significantly associated with educators’ stress and burnout. Rather, educators’ level of burnout was positively related to the burnout among those in their stress support networks. In addition, educators’ stress and burnout were positively related to the stress and burnout of their colleagues with whom they spent the most time. These findings highlight how educators’ perceptions of stress and burnout may be shared within their collegial networks and have implications for a role for colleagues in teacher stress-reduction and wellbeing-focused interventions.

A social network perspective on workplace inclusion: The role of network closure, network centrality, and need for affiliation

AbstractOrganizations are increasingly recognizing the important role employee inclusion perceptions play in promoting positive employee attitudes and behaviors. Although social networks are frequently cited as being a driver of perceived inclusion, little empirical work has examined the social network conditions that give rise to it. We address this gap by examining how both network position (indegree centrality) and network structure (network closure) relate to perceived workplace inclusion. We test our hypotheses with a sample of 364 professionals in a multinational pharmaceutical firm. We find that both indegree centrality and network closure are positively related to perceived workplace inclusion. The relationship between network centrality and perceived workplace inclusion is strengthened by a high level of network closure. In addition, the relationship between network closure and perceived workplace inclusion is strengthened by a high level of need for affiliation. Our results, therefore, suggest that both network centrality and closure play an important role in employee perceptions of inclusion and demonstrate the importance of considering need for affiliation as a boundary condition. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for theory and practice.

A hostile reputation: A social network approach to interstate hostility

State-level decisions to initiate militarized conflicts are the result of various factors, ranging from geographic proximity to the previous actions of potential foes. However, we know little about how the reputations of hostile actions shape future conflict and whether they vary for different types of country pairs. Through the adoption of a social network perspective, this research examines the role of post-Cold War hostility on the likelihood of future conflicts using the Militarized Interstate Dispute data from the Correlates of War project. We apply temporal exponential random graph models to evaluate whether the previous hostility levels of a country can determine future patterns of interstate conflict. Additionally, we consider how this association varies based on whether a country’s experience with an adversary is direct (a result of previous conflict with the adversary) or indirect (based on extra-dyadic disputes). Consistent with previous research, results suggest that pairs of countries with a direct history of hostile actions are more likely to fight in the future. However, in absence of this shared history, states are less likely to initiate conflict with those that have a particularly hostile or peaceful history, and instead target adversaries with middling levels of previous hostility.

Identification of Critical Risks in Hosting Sports Mega-events: a Social Network Perspective

Identifying the potential risks and their influencing factors in hosting sports mega-events can effectively reduce the probability of accident occurrence in the future. However, traditional risk identification primarily focuses on investigating these factors affecting each category of risk individually and ignores the interaction of risks, which leads to poor performance in risk management efficiency. As such, this study first collects a risk list for sports mega-events by means of content analysis using grounded theory, the original data of which comes from 26 research articles and 88 risk management cases. Then a risk network is constructed through the social network analysis (SNA), followed by a quantitative analysis from both the node level and the whole network level. The results indicate that organization and coordination, personnel training, traffic facilities, political conflicts, racial discrimination, and economic crisis are the critical risk factors in hosting sports mega-events. The corresponding suggestions are finally put forward to help organizers control risks at the source, prevent the spread of risk events, and improve efficiency of risk management.

The Dimensions of the Structure of MSM with HIV toward the Prevention of HIV and AIDS Transmission: A Qualitative Study

Men who have sex with men (MSM) are the most vulnerable key population in the transmission of HIV AIDS. They have closed behavior that makes it difficult for health programs to reach. This study explores the structural dimensions of MSM with HIV in preventing HIV AIDS transmission from the perspective of social networks and associations among MSM with HIV. This qualitative study with a grounded theory approach was conducted in Jember. Data were collected by using in-depth interviews with 12 HIV-positive MSM. Data were analyzed with the stages of codes, categorizing, and basic social-psychological processes. The triangulation is used to obtain the validity of the information. Being an MSM group for a long time, related to social networks and associations. The social network perspective is built through gathering activities with fellow MSM communities, gathering in cafes, boarding houses, own homes, rented houses, town square, and night entertainment places. Providing health information, safe sex, asking for HIV tests, and monitoring ARV is more manageable through the same HIV-positive MSM. The involvement of HIV-positive MSM in social activities or other environments can reduce the stigma and discrimination. From the association's perspective, to facilitate the socialization of HIV AIDS prevention are carried out through social activities. A few HIV-positive MSM use herbal medicine and do not believe in ARV. Regular peer group support activities can provide a correct understanding of the importance of ARV to minimize the risk of loss to follow-up. Elements of social networks and associations through peer group supports involved in social activities can facilitate communication, information, and education; also, controlling sexual behavior prevents HIV AIDS transmission. The policymakers need to strengthen community-based associations.

Collaborative Governance of Tower Crane Safety in the Chinese Construction Industry: A Social Network Perspective

Tower crane safety governance is an important issue related to the sustainable development of China’s construction industry. The complex collaborative relationship among stakeholders determines the efficiency of tower crane safety governance. From the perspective of social networks, this study constructs a collaborative governance structure model of tower crane safety from four dimensions, i.e., transaction, supervision, dependency, and communication, and analyzes the structural characteristics of tower crane safety collaborative governance and the mutual relationship among stakeholders. The results show that the tower crane safety governance process has a strong collaborative effect, but that collaboration in terms of supervision and communication among stakeholders is currently poor. The tower crane property owner occupies the core position, so their decisions have a great impact on tower crane safety. The power of the government is too large, and the power of supervision is too small, which affects the collaboration enthusiasm of other stakeholders, thus reducing the overall collaboration efficiency. The findings provide theoretical support for tower crane safety management in the construction industry in China. The social network perspective presented in this study can be applied to clarify relationships among stakeholders in other construction safety governance fields.

Gender and researchers with institutional affiliations in the global south/north in social network science

The following article aims to understand the prevalence of ascribed social characteristics such as the role of gender and the country of institutional affiliation of the authors in two prominent journals of social network science. Accordingly, we explore the Social Networks journal that has been extensively analysed to understand the evolution of the social network perspective and the development of this area of interest. Also, we explore the REDES journal, which mirrors the same journal but aims to represent the current state of social network science in Iberian America. For the analysis, we explore the network of these two journals, considering 301 papers from the Social Networks journal and 86 papers from REDES journal. For the analysis, we use exponential random graph models to control for simultaneously operating micro-mechanisms to understand the potential effects that allowed the emergence of these scientific networks. Our main results indicate that the country of institutional affiliation creates a centre-periphery tendency in both journals. Furthermore, there is a tendency of women to be an underrepresented group in the papers published in the period analysed.

A social network perspective on the Bamboo Ceiling: Ethnic homophily explains why East Asians but not South Asians are underrepresented in leadership in multiethnic environments.

In the United States, Asians appear disproportionately underrepresented in leadership roles, a puzzling phenomenon known as the "Bamboo Ceiling" (Hyun, 2005; Lu et al., 2020). We advance a social network explanation for this phenomenon: ethnic homophily. We theorize that East Asians (e.g., ethnic Chinese)-but not South Asians (e.g., ethnic Indians)-are less likely than other ethnicities to emerge as leaders in multiethnic environments partly because East Asians socialize more with ethnic ingroup members (other East Asians). Analyzing a survey of 54,620 Juris Doctor (JD) students from 124 U.S. law schools, Study 1 revealed that East Asians had the highest ethnic homophily of all ethnicities. Studies 2 and 3 examined friendship networks and leadership emergence in 11 class sections of new Master of Business Administration (MBA) students in a U.S. business school, and found that East Asians were the least likely to be nominated and elected as leaders. Social network analysis revealed that, compared to South Asians, Latinos, and Whites, East Asians exhibited higher ethnic homophily, which mediated their lower leadership emergence. These effects occurred for both East Asian internationals and East Asian Americans, and were robust after accounting for variables such as assertiveness (parallel mediator), network centrality, English proficiency, demographics, and personality. By integrating social network analysis into psychology, we identify ethnic homophily as one reason why the Bamboo Ceiling exists for East Asians but not South Asians. Moreover, by uncovering the negative link between ethnic homophily and leadership emergence, our research suggests that bonding with people from different ethnic backgrounds can facilitate individuals' leadership emergence in multiethnic environments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

(Second career) teachers' work socialization as a networked process: New empirical and methodological insights

This paper uses a quantitative social network perspective to provide insights on the importance of professional interactions for (second career) teachers' work socialization. Given the lack of statistical models addressing the relation between network data and individual variables, we drew on a multiple-membership social network model (MMMCSNA) to address our research questions. Our results show the importance of social capital in the process of teachers’ work socialization, even more so in the case of second career teachers. Moreover, as shown through a comparison between estimates in our MMMCSNA model and in a single-level regression model, the proposed model performed better.

Network Extraction and Analysis of Character Relationships in Chinese Literary Works.

Character relationships in literary works can be interpreted and analyzed from the perspective of social networks. Analysis of intricate character relationships helps to better understand the internal logic of plot development and explore the significance of a literary work. This paper attempts to extract social networks from Chinese literary works based on co-word analysis. In order to analyze character relationships, both social network analysis and cluster analysis are carried out. Network analysis is performed by calculating degree distribution, clustering coefficient, shortest path length, centrality, etc. Cluster analysis is used for partitioning characters into groups. In addition, an improved visualization method of hierarchical clustering is proposed, which can clearly exhibit character relationships within clusters and the hierarchical structure of clusters. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method succeeds in establishing a comprehensive framework for extracting networks and analyzing character relationships in Chinese literary works.

Multiple team membership and its mechanism

<p id="p00005">Because of the continuous shortage of valuable knowledge workers, and the rapid development of digital technology, multiple team membership (referred to as MTM) becomes more and more common in organizations. Compared to the prevalence of MTM in practice, research on MTM and its influence lags far behind and is still in its infancy in China. In order to improve the theoretical studies of MTM and guide the effectiveness of management practice, we systematically review the relevant and important research findings of MTM, summarize and develop the theoretical explanations of MTM, and introduce several promising directions for future research. <br/>Previous literature defined MTM on different levels. Specifically, individual-level MTM is defined as a situation in which employees formally participate in multiple teams within a given period of time and invest corresponding time and energy in each team; organizational-level MTM refers to the average of team memberships owned by all employees in an organization. Extant studies on MTM have mainly focused on the “number of teams” and the “variety of teams memberships”, and looked at these two elements to examine the effects of MTM. They found that, on the one hand, MTM is likely to promote the effectiveness of resource utilization and help employees approach diverse information and ideas, resulting in a better productivity; on the other hand, with the increase in the number of teams and the variety of those teams, employees can become overloaded, and thus MTM might have negative implications on employee performance. In sum, although previous research has conducted several explorations of the effects of MTM, unfortunately, current results have failed to reach a consensus. <br/>To further clarify the connotation of MTM and deepen MTM research, we underscore two important characteristics of MTM: multiple team contexts and multiple team identifications. Multiple team contexts emphasizes the differences in team processes and team emergent states between teams in which employees participate simultaneously; multiple team identifications focuses on MTM employees' identification with multiple team identities nested within individuals. These two characteristics extend MTM research by drawing attention to the difference in team processes and team emergence states, and MTM employees’ multiple identifications, which are overlooked by previous MTM studies that focus on “number of teams” and “variety of team memberships”. The exploration based on the two characteristics further reflects the uniqueness of MTM and helps to explain the divergence of conclusions in existing studies.This review has further organized the current research progress based on attention resource perspective, social network theory and social identity theory. Attention resource perspective mainly focuses on employee resource allocation, wastage and efficiency caused by MTM, which provides a solid theoretical foundation for MTM research. However, the contradictory research findings indicate that it is not sufficient to analyze the mechanisms of MTM from the attention resource perspective only. Following studies begin to consider the multiple team contexts that employees need to face from the perspective of social network, and to explore the influence of multiple team identifications that employees need to handle from the perspective of social identity. However, relevant research has just started, and a large number of empirical studies will be needed to further explain the mechanisms of MTM. <br/>This review further provides five important research directions for future research of MTM. First of all, scholars could introduce the social network position and personal agency when they explore the influence of MTM based on social network theory. Second, based on social identity theory, scholars need to focus on how employees manage the relationship between multiple team identities, especially how they respond to the potential enhancement or conflict deriving from multiple team identities, and how the superordinate identity (i.e., organizational identity) could moderate the impact of multiple team identities on MTM employees. The third suggestion is to integrate different theories and to further deepen our understanding of the mechanisms of MTM. For example, future studies could explain how, based on social identity theory, MTM employees perceive and manage multiple team identities and predict their proximal motivations, and then combine the attention resource perspective and social network theory to further depict the distal mechanisms of MTM to influence employees and teams. We also encourage future studies to consider the influence of the time factor on the mechanism of MTM and to conduct more studies with a dynamic perspective. Fifthly, considering that in the digital era, a variety of collaboration technologies and artificial intelligence are being introduced in the workplace and affecting employee learning and career development as well as team work designs, how to design and deploy advanced technologies to promote MTM employees’ work productivity and collective performance will be a very meaningful research question in the future. Additionally, this review also discusses the practical implication of MTM and how to manage MTM especially in the digital era.

When Do Team Members Share the Lead? A Social Network Analysis.

Shared leadership is not only about individual team members engaging in leadership, but also about team members adopting the complementary follower role. However, the question of what enables team members to fill in each of these roles and the corresponding influence of formal leaders have remained largely unexplored. Using a social network perspective allows us to predict both leadership and followership ties between team members based on considerations of implicit leadership and followership theories. From this social information processing perspective, we identify individual team members’ political skill and the formal leaders’ empowering leadership as important qualities that facilitate the adoption of each the leader and the follower role. Results from a social network analysis in a R&D department with 305 realized leadership ties support most of our hypotheses.

Evolution of Business Intelligence: An Analysis from the Perspective of Social Network

Evolution of Business Intelligence: An Analysis from the Perspective of Social Network

Recovery Assessment: Culture, Ethnicity, and Spiritual Dysfunction

Religion and Spirituality are essential pieces to an individual's or group's identity and are present on the spectrum of multicultural diversity. Human service practitioners cannot overlook how individuals conceptualize their relationship with the Sacred. Knowledge of spiritual beliefs and practices creates the basic cultural competence of the practitioner. It enriches the relationship between the practitioner and the person receiving service and makes room for powerful spiritual healing. There needs to be a professional nonsectarian change toward a holistic model of recovery and resilience that embraces the spiritual dimension. This dimension must include traditional and non-traditional belief systems not just as part of the self-help movement but as part of an integrated psychological and spiritual health model that complements people's biological and genetic foundation. This integrated model must focus on: (1) the elimination of stress in the overall community; (2) being attentive toward environmental factors such as divorce, death, and Illness; and (3) supporting and providing opportunities for better housing, increased employment opportunities and positive family activities. Effective treatment services must embrace a holistic approach that integrates well into a comprehensive social support network perspective

Stakeholders as Value Creators: The Role of Multi-Level Networks in Employee Wellness Programs

Recognizing the inherent limitations of a single level dyadic approach to stakeholders, this research uses a multi-level social networks perspective to examine value creation in wellness stakeholder networks. This study argues that stakeholder interactions at multiple levels of the network create value for the network and contribute to the marketization of wellness. At the macro level, network relationships create value through embeddedness, which shapes the structural boundaries of employee wellness programs. At the meso level, the stakeholders are relationally embedded in their networks and they create social and market congruence. At the micro level, the relationship among embedded actors contribute to the creation of cultural norms and institutionalization of employee wellness programs. The findings add to our understanding of value creation in stakeholder networks by going beyond dyads to focus on multi-level relationships and embedded actors. This article contributes to research by showing how embeddedness of the stakeholders in multi-layered networks and ties between these actors create value in wellness stakeholder networks. The findings provide insights into the marketization process of wellness as an important aspect of the contemporary marketplace.