Current working papers
Description
Organizational restructuring: the influence of formal and informal structure on tie formation. This paper considers how changes in formal structure and a key element of informal structure – the embeddedness of employee relationships – influence tie formation. Changing formal structure to separate employees or put employees together will increase tie formation rates because new and past affiliations create more opportunities for interaction and increase preferences to form ties. At the same time, moving employees may decrease the structural alignment between the informal networks and the formal position of moved employees. This can result in conflicting contributions to organizational identity that may reduce the rate of tie formation when employees are heavily embedded. To test my arguments, I use a two-period panel of data on employee relationships in the customer services division of a financial services provider. Results show evidence of competing formal position and informal networks but the magnitude of these effects suggest that misalignments help rather than hinder restructuring efforts.
Formal disaggregation and gender homophily inside firms. Formal structure and a key influence on informal structure – gender homophily – are likely to jointly influence tie formation inside firms. Irrespective of individual preferences, the division of labor inside firms is likely to decrease relationship diversity. Because functional expertise tends to be gender-biased, segregating employees is likely to decrease the structural opportunity to form relationships with those of the opposite gender. Hence macro-social effects imply that the combined effect of membership in a common formal group and sharing a common gender is likely to make tie formation more likely. I test my hypotheses in a study of tie formation in the customer services organization of a financial services provider.
Reversing the flow of influence: Networks, power and resistance to organizational change (with L. Mors). We consider how social networks can shape management’s ability to implement formal changes and employees’ ability to resist. While an organization may have more power to influence change when working relationships are more heavily embedded, individual power can reverse the flow of influence in the network. An individual with power can use the dependency of others to gather support from surrounding contacts to support resistance to change. Our arguments are supported by analysis of the effectiveness of formal change upon 600 internal relationships of 59 partners in a global professional services firm.
A bridge too far: The effect of informal ties across formal boundaries on individual exploration performance (with L. Mors) We examine how an employee’s boundary-spanning informal relationships affect exploration performance – that is, an employee’s ability to develop and execute innovative business ideas and new business opportunities. We consider both relationships that cross formal organizational boundaries and relationships that connect different parts of a firm’s informal social network. Further, we distinguish internal relationships between employees, and relationships that reach outside the firm from a firm’s employees to its clients and to other parties. Consistent with extant research, we argue that internal relationships that span internal boundaries will provide access to information and resources from different knowledge domains and hence provide sources for new ideas. Additionally, we argue that when internal boundary-spanning relationships are also surrounded by many third party contacts, an individual can better mobilize the support and resources needed to execute those new ideas, and hence the density of the informal network surrounding a boundary-spanning relationships will have a greater positive effect on exploration performance. Similarly, we find external cross-specialization ties only have a positive effect on exploration performance when actors have external indirect ties in their networks. Detailed data on 1386 informal relationships of 79 senior partners in a large management consultancy lend support to these arguments.