Understanding Workplace Relationships

Existing research has found a positive relationship between intrinsic motivational orientation and employee innovative performance. Whereas prior studies have emphasized psychological explanations for this relationship, we draw from social network theory and posit an indirect, network-structural mechanism. We hypothesize that employees with an intrinsic motivational orientation tend to become more central within the organization’s informal advice network, which in turn aids their innovative performance. We test and find support for this argument in two distinct organizations which, while similar in terms of size and geographical location, vary markedly in terms of organizational culture, structure, and task environment. By demonstrating the mediating role of advice network centrality, our findings provide novel insight into how intrinsic motivation leads to employee innovative performance and create a fruitful integration between motivation and network theories.

A substantial body of research over the last two decades has examined the determinants and outcomes of interpersonal trust within organizations. However, little of this research has considered how the social network that surrounds an interpersonal relationship might influence the interpersonal trust within that relationship and ultimately the effectiveness and success of individuals within an organization. We address this gap by examining the role of helping behaviors and brokerage in organizational networks. Utilizing a social exchange framework, we propose that brokers have the opportunity to identify individuals who are in need of information and other resources, act to satisfy those needs by performing organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBIs) toward those individuals, and by doing so, earn others’ trust. And it is this trust that enables brokers to gain performance advantages by maximizing the resource benefits of their structural position. Network data from two empirical studies provide substantial support for our hypotheses that helping others mediates the brokerage-trust relationship and trust mediates the brokerage-performance relationship. We conclude with managerial implications and avenues for future research.

For decades, researchers have known that professional networks that are characterized by brokerage—connections to otherwise unconnected subnetworks within the organization—provide important advantages. People who occupy the powerful brokerage role reap significant career rewards, including faster rates of promotion, larger bonuses, more involvement in innovation, and greater likelihood of being identified as top talent (Halevy et al., 2019). However, recent evidence has emerged to suggest that women are less likely than men to occupy the brokerage position and, even when they do occupy it, are less likely to leverage it for career success (Fang et al., 2020). Several mechanisms have been advanced to explain these findings, including structural constraints caused by systemic discrimination and the effect of gender role expectations. This chapter reviews the research on gender and brokerage, and posits that a gendered socio-emotional experience of the brokerage role may also contribute to systematic disadvantage for women. Organizations can apply these ideas to further the career success of women through training and restructuring activities that reframe the brokerage experience, concrete tools for strategic network development, and and by reducing barriers to effective network development.

Past research suggests that employees who establish a high-quality Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) relationship with their supervisor are more likely to feel energized and are also more satisfied at work. We propose that relational energy—that is, the heightened level of psychological resourcefulness generated from interpersonal interactions that enhances one’s capacity to do work—is a mediating link between LMX and employee job satisfaction. Furthermore, we examine whether employees with low-LMX relationships (those in the out-group) who receive lower levels of relational energy from their supervisor compared to high-LMX employees, can still be satisfied at work depending on their embeddedness in a larger network of energizing relationships with co-workers. In other words, we empirically test a second-stage moderated-mediation model examining relational energy as a mediator between LMX and job satisfaction and relational energy from co-workers as a boundary condition. Results using a sample of 185 employees support our prediction and hence highlight the valuable source of relational energy that co-workers represent. Finally, we suggest practical actions individuals and managers can take to improve their own relational energy and the energy in their workplace.

Despite the plethora of research on organizational change, we still have little understanding of how actors’ workplace relations influence  change within their organizational environment when new practices are introduced. As such, we investigate workplace relationships as structural embeddedness, with its focus on the degree to which actors are engrained in cohesive groups. We adopt this perspective in a study of selected hospital trusts (in the UK) that are attempting to introduce and integrate new practices to enhance the quality and provision of patient care. We take a social network approach to test hypotheses on the relationship between structural embeddedness and the uptake of new practices. We used Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) to understand the interactions among organizational actors and their effects. We find that the presence of structural embeddedness does not constrain the uptake of new practices. Rather, it is the lack of these relations that constrains the opportunities for organizational change.

Organizations are increasingly boundaryless and relying on external workers—such as freelancers who are temporarily employed in an organization on a project basis. Because freelancers are multiple jobholders and navigate the work environment as independent workers, their opportunities to build work-related relationships are typically different from conventional, full-time employees. Yet, little is known about how freelancers forge the social relationships giving them access to the knowledge needed to perform their daily tasks. We advance knowledge on this topic by suggesting that freelancers are the catalysts of knowledge-seeking relationships involving colleagues at the (temporary) employer, contacts in work-like environments (i.e., coworking spaces) and personal work-related ties accumulated over time. We discuss how freelancers’ identity—schematic knowledge about who they are at the workplace—influences their engagement in different relationships. We investigate these issues using cross-sectional data that we have collected in a sample of 38 freelancers employed in the media industry. We combine text data consisting of freelancers’ description of their professional identity with ego-network data capturing the freelancers’ professional and personal knowledge-seeking relationships. We derive and discuss the practical implications of our study for both freelancers and organizations.

Knowledge exchange among employees in organizations is critical to employees’ ability to solve problems and innovate. However, the possibility that employees may have different perceptions regarding the existence of exchanges between them and the factors that may reduce these differences have not been considered in the literature. Based on a socio-cognitive approach, we argue that misalignments in perceptions of knowledge transfer are likely to be common in organizations. We also propose that different forms of mutual familiarity with exchange partners will be associated with the alignment of perceptions of dyadic knowledge transfer. Our results show that misalignment in perceptions of complex knowledge transfers is more common than alignment. It is a pervasive phenomenon in the organization we studied. Based on an in-depth sociometric research design and exponential random modelling we further find that only one form of familiarity (mutual trust) contributes to increasing the alignment of dyadic knowledge transfer perceptions. We discuss the implications of our results for practice, highlighting the implications of misalignment in knowledge transfer in organizations. We also suggest actions that managers can take to diminish the risk of misalignments and facilitate the transfer of complex knowledge in their teams.

Considerable research has examined the antecedents and benefits of knowledge sharing in organizations. Workplaces, however, are competitive arenas, and it is generally recognized that rivalry between employees occurs as a result of them jostling for resources, opportunities, and promotion. We theorize that rivalry, i.e., two high-performing individuals competing for the same resources and opportunities, can result in individuals perceiving that others are unwilling to share knowledge. We also seek to understand if high-performing individuals who are co-located are more likely to perceive that others are unwilling to share knowledge. To test our hypotheses, we conducted a study of 185 employees in a global IT department of a large global corporation. Using quadratic assignment procedure (QAP), we analyzed 34,040 dyadic relationships. We find support for our theory that high-performing individuals are more likely to perceive others as unwilling to share knowledge when those individuals are also high-performers and if they are co-located. We discuss the practical implications of our findings for individuals and leaders.

Workplace friendships, i.e., when work colleagues are also friends, are a widespread phenomenon in organizations which has attracted increasing research interest in recent decades. Numerous studies have investigated consequences of workplace friendships and found positive outcomes, such as increased employee job satisfaction or organizational performance, as well as negative outcomes, such as decreased knowledge-sharing between different friendship cliques. Other studies have examined what shapes workplace friendships, focusing on determinants such as personality or the spatial composition of organizations. Finally, an increasing number of studies focus on multiplex workplace friendships, where employees who are friends are also linked by a specific work-focused relationship. In this chapter, we first take stock of the literature on workplace friendships by providing an overview of their antecedents and consequences at the individual, the group, and the organizational level, and review the smaller body of research on multiplex workplace friendships. Second, we critically discuss practical implications of workplace friendships, focusing on their relevance to three current challenges for employees and organizations: the increase in virtual work, social inequalities in organizations, and the increased overlap of professional and private life. Finally, we provide recommendations for organizations on how to address these challenges and effectively manage workplace friendships.

What explains friendship at work? The answer according to the homophily principle is that friendships are more likely among individuals who are similar. Classic work on homophily assessed similarity in terms of both demographic indicators and underlying cognitive perceptions. Organizational researchers, however, have tended to rely on a narrower, structural interpretation of homophily, one that assumes that perceptions of similarity can be bypassed because demography is a good proxy for these underlying perceptions. Using data from an organization located in North America, we open the black box of homophily and submit this assumption to empirical test. There was no support for the idea that the relationship between gender and friendship choice is mediated by underlying cognitive perceptions of similarity. We found, instead, that similarity in gender and perceptions of similarity were independently related to friendship choice. We also found evidence of heterophily when it comes to self-monitoring personality: the greater the difference in the self-monitoring scores of two individuals, the more likely they were to be friends. We close by discussing implications for theory and practice.

This chapter focuses on the possibilities to develop and repair interpersonal trust in an organizational context from a social network perspective. Trust violations have been argued to be one of the major difficulties that plague organizational life and challenge effective workplace relationships. It is therefore important and meaningful to investigate how trust develops and decays, and how it can be repaired. Despite a surge of research in recent years that investigates trust dynamics from psychological and behavioral perspectives, less is known about how trust dynamics may be influenced by the social context. Drawing upon a systematic literature review in which we found a set of network-related factors that (potentially) influence trust formation, we build a conceptual framework that summarizes how these factors affect trust and which aspects require further attention from researchers. Based on this framework, we provide a set of recommendations intended for managers and executives navigating the social trenches of organizations.