Martin Kilduff

University College London | UCL · School of Management

This Element synthesizes the current state of research on organizational social networks from its early foundations to contemporary debates. It highlights the characteristics that make the social network perspective distinctive in the organizational research landscape, including its emphasis on structure and outcomes. It covers the main theoretical...

Connecting otherwise disconnected individuals and groups—spanning structural holes—can earn social network brokers faster promotions, higher remuneration, and enhanced creativity. Organizations also benefit through improved communication and coordination from these connections between knowledge silos. Neglected in prior research, however, has been...

Tertius iungens brokering that brings together people who might not otherwise meet is crucial for organizational effectiveness. But we know little about whether and why women and men differ in their propensity to engage in this brokering. Our paper focuses on the origins and mitigation of gender differences in the propensity to bring people togethe...

Type of paper: Viewpoint Purpose The need to make a 'theoretical contribution' is a presumed mandate that permeates any researcher's career in the Social Sciences, yet all too often this remains a source of confusion and frustration. This paper reflects on, and further develops, the principal themes discussed in the 'OM Theory' workshop in Dublin i...

The 2010 call for papers on relational pluralism

The question of agency has been neglected in social network research, in part because the structural approach to social relations removes consideration of individual volition and action. But recent emphasis on purposive individuals has reignited interest in agency across a range of social network research topics. Our paper provides a brief history...

Insights from social network research have generated significant advancements in disciplines such as sociology, economics, and psychology. In comparison, the incorporation of social network ideas into international business (IB) research remains more limited. The purpose of this special issue is to foster further research on social networks in IB....

Social networks involve ties (and their absence) between people in social settings such as organizations. Yet much social network research, given its roots in sociology, ignores the individuality of people in emphasizing the constraints of the structural positions that people occupy. A recent movement to bring people back into social network resear...

Research suggests positions of brokerage in organizational networks provide many benefits, but studies tend to assume everyone is equally able to perceive and willing to act on brokerage opportunities. Here we challenge these assumptions in a direct investigation of whether people can perceive brokerage opportunities and are willing to broker. We p...

This article focuses on an emergent debate in organizational behavior concerning personality stability and change. We introduce foundational psychological research concerning whether individual personality, in terms of traits, needs, and personal constructs, is fixed or changeable. Based on this background, we review recent research evidence on the...

Workplace friendship obligations of openness and favoritism are likely to conflict with organizational norms of discretion and neutrality. This dilemma is especially apparent for Simmelian brokers, who divide time and attention across multiple otherwise disconnected friendship cliques. In two samples, we found support for the core idea that the fit...

What kind of person is likely to emerge as an informal leader in the workplace? Experimental research shows that high self-monitors—who tend to adjust their attitudes and behaviors to the demands of different situations—emerge as informal leaders in temporary groups. By contrast, low self-monitors—who tend to be true to themselves in terms of consi...

What are the long-term consequences of initially beneficial high-reputation workplace ties? Under uncertainty, acolytes (i.e., subordinates with work connections to high-reputation industry leaders) are likely to benefit in terms of signaling fitness for promotion in the external job market. Analysis of promotion outcomes of coaches in the National...

Purpose – The need to make a “theoretical contribution” is a presumed mandate that permeates any researcher’s career in the Social Sciences, yet all too often this remains a source of confusion and frustration. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on, and further develops, the principal themes discussed in the “OM Theory” workshop in Dublin in 2...

Purpose – The need to make a “theoretical contribution” is a presumed mandate that permeates any researcher’s career in the Social Sciences, yet all too often this remains a source of confusion and frustration. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on, and further develops, the principal themes discussed in the “OM Theory” workshop in Dublin in 2...

This study examines how followers regulate their outward expression of emotions in the context of two types of leadership that are commonly associated with transformational leadership, namely charismatic leadership and individually considerate leadership. Based on new theorizing and a series of three studies involving experiments and field work, we...

This paper focuses on an emergent debate about the microfoundations of organizational social networks. We consider three theoretical positions: an individual agency perspective suggesting that people, through their individual characteristics and cognitions, shape networks; a network patterning perspective suggesting that networks, through their str...

Research has established that groups are pervaded by feelings. But group emotion research within organizational science has suffered in recent years from a lack of terminological clarity, from a narrow focus on small groups, and from an overemphasis on micro-processes of emotion transmission. We address those problems by reviewing and systematicall...

Using data from 138 independent samples, we meta-analytically examined three research questions concerning the roles of personality and network position in organizations. First, how do different personality characteristics-self-monitoring and the Big Five personality traits-relate to indegree centrality and brokerage, the two most studied structura...

Using data from 138 independent samples, we meta-analytically examined three research questions concerning the roles of personality and network position in organizations. First, how do different personality characteristics—self-monitoring and the Big Five personality traits—relate to indegree centrality and brokerage, the two most studied structura...

Charisma is crucially important for a range of leadership outcomes. Charisma is also in the eye of the beholder-an attribute perceived by followers. Traditional leadership theory has tended to assume charismatic attributions flow to men rather than women. We challenge this assumption of an inevitable charismatic bias toward men leaders. We propose...

Research has established that groups are pervaded by feelings. But group emotion research within organizational science has suffered in recent years from a lack of terminological clarity, from a narrow focus on small groups, and from an overemphasis on micro-processes of emotion transmission. We address those problems by reviewing and systematicall...

The research interest in organizational social networks has increased rapidly during the last years, as shown by the growing number of network conferences, special issues appearing in major academic journals, and in general by the intensive scholarly work in this research area (for a review, see Kilduff & Brass, 2010). In this symposium, we want to...

Social networks can be considered patterns of cognitions in the minds of perceivers or concrete patterns of interpersonal interactions. But how are these two patterns related? We bring together cognitive and actual network research in showing that cognitive biases associated with human motivations – in terms of status striving and communal striving...

We aim to bring together leading scholars in the area of organizational social network research to discuss the state of the literature and map the frontiers of work linking personality and networks in organizations. Prior work has highlighted the invaluable role that networks play in organizational life—we know that the structure of network ties su...

D o women face bias in the social realm in which they are purported to excel? Across two different studies (one organizational and one comprising MBA teams), we examined whether the friendship networks around women tend to be systematically misperceived and whether there were effects of these misperceptions on the women themselves and their teammat...

Bipartite networks (e.g., software developers linked to open-source projects) are common in settings studied by organization scholars. But the structure underlying bipartite networks tends to be overlooked. Commonly, two modes are reduced to one mode for analysis, causing loss of information. We review techniques for projecting 2-modes onto 1-mode...

Relational pluralism exists when actors maintain multiple kinds of relationships with one another and develop multiple identities as a result. The outcomes of relational pluralism can include greater flexibility in building network ties, more stable exchange relationships, and the ability to adopt tailored innovations. We develop a typology of rela...

The article features a conversation between Rob Cross and Martin Kilduff about organizational network analysis in research and practice. It demonstrates the value of using social network perspectives in HRM. Drawing on the discussion about managing personal networks; managing the networks of others; the impact of social networking sites on percepti...

We provide an overview of social network analysis focusing on network advantage as a lens that touches on much of the area. For reasons of good data and abundant research, we draw heavily on studies of people in organizations. Advantage is traced to network structure as a proxy for the distribution of variably sticky information in a population. Th...

Why do managers help employees with their negative emotions, and how do employees respond? We analyzed interview and network data from the head office of a recruiting agency. We found that managers active in the provision of emotion help thought of such help as over and above their managerial duties, whereas employees defined emotional support as m...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to look at how the nature and contribution of leadership is evolving in step with developments in the environment and our organizations. Design/methodology/approach – The authors argue that a collective or network leadership strategy is most suitable for the information age. This is based upon research and ex...

In this paper, we uncover the often taken-for-granted structuralist assumptions that comprise what some proclaim a radically new research paradigm. We review existing research on the attributes, origins, and consequences of network structural phenomenon, and suggest ways in which theory-driven organizational network research can go beyond structura...

When leaders interact in teams with their subordinates, they build social capital that can have positive effects on team performance. Does this social capital affect team performance because subordinates come to see the leader as charismatic? We answered this question by examining 2 models. First, we tested the charisma-to-centrality model accordin...

We examine rationalized logics developed within discourses of the philosophy of science for implications for the organization of new knowledge. These logics, derived from a range of philosophies (structural realism, instrumentalism, problem solving, foundationalism, critical realism) offer alternative vocabularies of motive, frameworks for reasonin...

Emotional intelligence (EI) comprises a set of abilities related to detecting, using, understanding and managing emotion. Research and discussion of EI has disproportionately focused on prosocial outcomes and has neglected the possibility that individuals high in EI may use their skills to advance their own interests, even at the expense of others....

We examine the influence exiles have on the cultures left behind. As people break from the familiar routines of country or organization, they look forward to their intended destinations, but also backward to the homes they are leaving. It is that backward glance that we suggest may have powerful reverberations. Today, about 100 million people live...

Given the growing popularity of the social network perspective across diverse organizational subject areas, this review examines the coherence of the research tradition (in terms of leading ideas from which the diversity of new research derives) and appraises current directions and controversies. The leading ideas at the heart of the organizational...

Despite growing interest in social network brokerage, its psychological antecedents have been neglected. One possibility is that brokerage relates to self-monitoring personality orientation. High self-monitors, relative to low self-monitors, in adapting their self-presentations to the demands of different groups, may occupy positions as brokers bet...

Given the complexity of organizing and keeping track of even a small organizational network, boundedly rational people may have learned to use small world principles in perceiving friendship networks: arrange people in dense clusters, and connect the clusters with short paths. Analysis of 116 perceived friendship networks from four different organi...

I was talking to the managing editor of one of the leading management journals recently concerning the reluctance to move to Web-based publishing. “The authors and the reviewers told us it’s far too much trouble to go through all those steps of uploading manuscripts or reviews when you can just put something in the mail or send an e-mail,” was her...

The author offers readers of the “Academy of Management Review” journal the top ten reasons why their papers might not be sent out for review. Reasons include reviewing literature and introductions rather than offering distinctive contributions and analysis, papers geared towards practitioners, which isn't the primary audience of the journal, paper...

Who provides help to employees suffering anxiety and emotional pain in organizations? From an interactionist perspective, we anticipated that increasing levels of managerial responsibility would unlock discretionary helping behavior related to differences in self-monitoring and positive affectivity. Results from a study of 94 members of a recruitme...

The article discusses the “Academy of Management Review“ (AMR) upon its 30-year anniversary in 2005. In that year, the editor asked a committee headed by Madan Pillutla and including Gerald F. Davis and Christopher P. Earley to pick what they considered to be the most innovative, frame-breaking article from each of the first two decades of publishe...

This paper addresses two important questions concerning social fragmentation in work teams. First, from where do disconnections between team members, measured in terms of the proportion of structural holes within the work team, derive? Second, what are the consequences for team performance of having more or less structural holes between team member...

Instead of paradigmatic unity, we call for progressive theory development from a set of core concepts (Lakatos, 1970) comprising primacy of relations, ubiquity of embed- dedness, social utility of connections, and structural patterning of social life. Orga- nizational network research can capture complexity and distinctiveness of individu- als and...

Four published reanalyses of part of the celebrated medical innovation data focus on network effects on the diffusion of tetracycline. Each reanalysis rejects the findings of the previous analysis. This article shows that in the early 1950s, when the original data were collected, private practice physicians, swamped by demand, but facing threats to...

This article investigates, for leadership research, the implications of new directions in social network theory that emphasize networks as both cognitive structures in the minds of organizational members and opportunity structures that facilitate and constrain action. We introduce the four core ideas at the heart of the network research program: th...

The Publisher regrets that incorrect numbering was used in the sections and subsections of this paper. The corrected paper follows with revised numbering. The Publisher would like to apologize for any inconvenience caused.

This article discusses changes within the staff of the journal, “Academy of Management Review.” New associate editor, Linda Treviño, is introduced. Treviño is a professor of organizational behavior and has pioneered research on the management of ethical conduct within organizations. It is mentioned that she received the Academy of Management Review...

This article presents an editorial expressing some observations on the theory publishing process in the hope of reducing the mystery surrounding theory development and publication. Theory papers succeed if they offer important and original ideas. The route to good theory leads not through gaps in the literature but through an engagement with proble...

This article investigates, for leadership research, the implications of new directions in social network theory that emphasize networks as both cognitive structures in the minds of organizational members and opportunity structures that facilitate and constrain action. We introduce the four core ideas at the heart of the network research program: Th...

The role of individual action in the enactment of structures of constraint and opportunity has proved to be particularly elusive for network researchers. We propose three frontiers for future network research that zoom back and forth between individual and collective levels of analysis. First, we consider how dilemmas concerning social capital can...

This chapter presents an affirmative and emancipatory postmodernism characterized by epistemological and methodological pluralism. Many narratives are to be preferred to just one, many styles of research are available and useful, and local, limited and fragmented research initiatives have contributions to make to our common enterprise. The chapter...

The call for greater relevance in management research leads us to examine the remedies offered by organization theory to organizational problems. In contrast to Starkey and Madan (2001), we argue that research engagement with other academic disciplines helps produce broadly useful knowledge. Installing practitioners in central places in the researc...

This article develops a cultural agreement approach to organizational culture that emphasizes how clusters of individuals reinforce potentially idiosyncratic understandings of many aspects of culture including the structure of network relations. Building on recent work concerning Simmelian tied dyads (defined as dyads embedded in three-person cliqu...

This article examines how different personality types create and benefit from social networks in organizations. Using data from a 116-member high-technology firm, we tested how self-monitoring orientation and network position related to work performance. First, chameleon-like high self-monitors were more likely than true-to-themselves low self-moni...

The study of the classics in our field is important to the themes of this special issue because (1) the classics have shaped the world we live in: (2) studying the classics enlarges our theoretical alternatives: and (3) the critique of taken-for-granted assumptions enshrined in the classics can spur change, development, and pluralism. We briefly re...

One community's resistance to the projected siting of a hazardous waste facility provides a case study of clashing discourse between modernity's champions and its sceptics. The events and outcomes of this case raise questions about the widespread assumption that science, reason and rationality are necessarily the bases for good decisions in society...

Demography research rarely examines the black box within which the cognitive diversity of the top management team is assumed to affect firm performance. Using data from 35 simulated firms run by a total of 159 managers attending executive education programs, the current research tested several hypotheses concerned with (a) the relationship between...

Under what circumstances are individuals' perceptions of friendship relations shaped by the balance schema? Using data from 4 organizations varying in size from 21 to 33 members, the authors investigated how ego's perception of the social distance from ego to alter affected the proportion of alter's friendships perceived by ego as balanced. Balance...

Using distinctiveness theory, research shows that the relative rarity of a group in a social context tended to promote members' use of that group as a basis for shared identity and social interaction. Relative majority group members, racial minorities and women in a master of business administration cohort were more likely to make identity and frie...

This is a most unusual paper. It is based on 11 months of ethnographic studies in a Japanese high-technology company. It investigates the structuring process of identity creation in organization. The authors painstakingly detail how the technologies of production, routinization and spatial order combine into daily mutual dependencies, joint sensema...

Drawing selectively from the often countervailing currents of postmodernism, we argue for an epistemology that combines a:skepticism toward metanarrative with a commitment to rigorous standards of enquiry in pursuit of radical challenges to accepted knowledge. We discuss five problematics concerned with normal science, truth, representation, style,...

This study tracked 139 graduates of the same master's of business administration program for five years and demonstrated significant main effects of the personality variable self-monitoring on career mobility. The chameleon-like high self-monitors were more likely than the true-to-themselves low self-monitors to change employers, move locations, an...

We challenge the claimed incommensurability of individualism and structuralism by showing how a cognitive theory can guide the use of structural methods. According to balance theory, there is a strain toward cognitive balance in observers' perceptions of friendship relations. Thus, we found, as predicted, that being perceived to have a prominent fr...

This reading of March and Simon's (1958) Organizations illustrates the deconstructive approach to foundational texts. The article deconstructs the positivist agenda formulated in Organizations to show that the text (a) replicates the moves of predecessors it condemns and (b) asserts an ideology of programming that justifies the inevitability of fra...

How do the members of a multinational organization organize themselves each day to replicate the interconnections, the hierarchies, the problems and the routines with which they are familiar? It would be a mistake to assume that the taken-for-granted structures of everyday life such as interpersonal relationships, chains of command and exchange net...

Research on multinational corporations (MNCs) has neglected routines despite their importance for the process of coordination, and their prominence in organization theory. This paper focuses on three aspects of routinization in MNCs. First, the transmission of routines across cultural boundaries in considered. Second, the focus moves to routine int...

The patterns of interview choices of 170 MBA students were tracked unobtrusively over 5 mo. Two personality variables, self-monitoring (SM) and social uniqueness, were used to partition the sample. The results confirmed that personality types hypothesized to differ in their preferences for social comparison information did differ significantly both...

Under what circumstances does social information affect choices? A recent test of social information processing theory showed little effect of anonymous social cues on choices of brief tasks (Kilduff & Regan, 1988). But from the perspective of social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954) people faced with important and ambiguous decisions, such as th...

Organizational culture is often described as a management control device, but this view obscures the importance of informal social interactions for the emergence and modification of culture. We elicited seven cultural dimensions used by employees to predict and make sense of the behavior patterns of others in an entrepreneurial firm. Forty-seven ke...

Within the framework of social comparison theory, student bids for job interviews were studied over five months. Friends bid similarly, and those who perceived each other as similar bid similarly. These patterns remained significant controlling for similarity of job preferences. The results were moderated by self-monitoring and perceived social uni...

This study shows how the emotional phases that accompany market crisis can be related to an underlying cycle of actions, attributions, and regulatory reactions among participants in the market environment. The action-attribution-regulation process is here called "enactment," in order to focus on how market participants create the environment that t...

This field experiment investigated the effects of the act of voting itself on voters' attitudes in the 1984 presidential election. The subjects were 139 voters who were interviewed either on entering or immediately on departing the polling place. They responded to questions concerning the chances of their candidates being elected president, the out...

Do ratings of tasks accurately reflect the influences on people's choices of tasks? Does information from others have strong effects on attitudes toward tasks, but weak effects on task choices? What effect does direct experience with tasks designed to be stimulating or dull have on task ratings and task choices? To answer these questions, we collec...

How can we conceptualize the production of scientific knowledge in the contemporary landscape of hybrid firms, disciplinary fragmentation, and reputational struggle? We derive from philosophy of science two fundamental questions concerning ontology and epistemology, and discuss the implications of these questions for the organization of knowledge a...