Bridging the Gap between Research and Practice in Organizational Network Analysis: A Conversation between Rob Cross and Martin Kilduff

BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN

RESEARCH AND PRACTICE IN

ORGANIZATIONAL NETWORK

ANALYSIS: A CONVERSATION

BETWEEN ROB CROSS AND

MARTIN KILDUFF

R O B C R O S S , R O B E R T K A Š E , M A R T I N K I L D U F F, A N D Z E L L A K I N G

The article features a conversation between Rob Cross and Martin Kilduff

about organizational network analysis in research and practice. It demon-

strates 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 perceptions of relation-

ships; and ethical issues in organizational network analysis, we propose

specifi c suggestions to bring social network perspectives closer to HRM re-

searchers and practitioners and rebalance our attention to people and to their

relationships.

Keywords: research methods and design, network analysis, social networks, employee relations

Correspondence to: Robert Kaše, Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana, Kardeljeva plošcad 17, 1000

Ljubljana, Slovenija, Phone: +386 1 5892-400, Fax: +386 1 5892-698, E-mail: [email protected].

Human Resource Management, July–August 2013, Vol. 52, No. 4. Pp. 627–644

© 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).

DOI:10.1002/hrm.21545

There has never been a more exciting time to be involved in the research and practice of organizational net-work analysis. With the advent of online tools that make it possible to

connect, share, and collaborate with friends, colleagues, and strangers around the world, we have moved into a social networking age. But while this network epidemic is preoccupy-ing us online, a quieter revolution is hap-pening within workplaces. Business leaders, managers, and HR professionals are beginning

to consider the potential of a new way of thinking about the informal links that hold their businesses together. These companies understand the importance of thinking about wiring as well as hiring, managing connec-tions as well as compensation, and making use of a toolkit that helps them do so.

One of the key proponents of these tools in business is Rob Cross of the University of Virginia. Cross founded the Network Roundtable, a consortium of close to 100 cor-porate, public, and nonprofit organizations

628 HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT, JULY–AUGUST 2013

Human Resource Management DOI: 10.1002/hrm

The conversation

ranged from

practical tools

to ethical

considerations but

centered around one

important message:

that the social

network perspective

is central to HRM

but often poorly

understood by

managers and

scholars alike.

that sponsor research on network applica-tions of critical management issues. Through the Roundtable and several popular and acclaimed books, Cross brings the theories and tools of network analysis to business lead-ers and managers. At the heart of his research is a survey-based approach that provides an X-ray of an organization, illuminating how work really gets done and visualizing the hid-den power of social networks (Cross & Parker, 2004). Cross’s work rests on the shoulders of a long line of academic giants who have pio-neered, developed, validated, and contested the study of informal networks in businesses for nearly a century—such as Elton Mayo, who observed game playing and window

controversies in the Hawthorne studies of the 1920s; Jacob Moreno (1934), a social psycholo-gist who introduced sociometry and sociograms to network analy-sis (see Figure 1 for an example); Thomas Allen, who in the 1970s showed how human systems could be restructured to bring about better person-to-person contact and Martin Kilduff and Dan Brass, who are spearheading future directions of organizational network research today (Kilduff & Brass, 2010). Martin Kilduff, cur-rently a professor of management at University College London, has published widely on percep-tions of social networks. His work has demonstrated how differences in cognitive style and personal-ity shape how people think about their own and others’ networks.

As guest editors of this special issue, we wanted to bring together a master practitioner of organi-

zational network analysis with a researcher at the forefront of academic knowledge. So in the autumn of 2011, we engineered a conver-sation between Cross and Kilduff. We wanted to find out what organizations can learn from the most recent findings from the academic world. We also wondered whether insights from organizational practice might move academic debates forward. The conversation

ranged from practical tools to ethical consid-erations but centered around one important message: that the social network perspective is central to HRM but often poorly under-stood by managers and scholars alike.

In the following excerpts from the con-versation, Cross and Kilduff articulate this message. We introduce each part of the con-versation with a short section providing con-text for the discussion that follows. Some technical terms (shown in bold) are defined in the Appendix for readers unfamiliar with social network theories and techniques.

The Fundamentals of Managing Your Network

It has become a truism to say that networks are important for success. Whether by winning friends and influencing people, jostling for con-nections that can open doors, being seen with the right people, or seeking out advice, people know that social connections provide momentum. Most people also understand that connections are not equally distributed. Some people are richer in ac-cess to power, influence, or opportunity. Some are meshed in close-knit groups that share many con-nections, while others are relatively isolated on the periphery of a group, or span across several disconnected groups of people. This social pat-terning is part and parcel of the world we live in, and we navigate it instinctively. However, outside the world of social network research, most people lack a vocabulary for talking about the structure of their network and the benefits they might ac-crue if they were to manage it more consciously.

Guest Editors: What are the key lessons that managers can learn about managing people from the current academic debate on organizational networks?

Martin: When I think of the current aca-demic debates, I think of four things that are discussed often among academics: weak ties, structural holes, cognition, and personality. Managers could and perhaps should be aware of the research findings and what they could learn from them. First, each manager needs to understand his or her personality. That is, do they have an outgoing, flexible personal-ity orientation (i.e., high in self-monitoring) that makes it easy for them to do the kinds of


RESEARCH AND PRACTICE IN ONA: A CONVERSATION 629

things that much of the network research is suggesting they should do? Or are they low in self-monitoring (paying little attention to what social situations require) and prefer to hunker down with their old pals, reconfirm-ing current beliefs rather than being open to diverse influences? If they are very flexible and chameleon-like, perhaps they need to understand that they don’t need more and more ties; they need to understand the struc-ture of ties.

That leads to the second part, which is cognition. Cognition research suggests that it’s important to perceive networks accu-rately. If you’re going to try to manage your own network or other people’s networks, you can easily get it wrong. Other people’s friend-ships, for example, are relatively difficult to perceive. Lots of people are friendly, but that does not mean they are good friends; they may be enemies, in fact. So before trying to manage things it’s important to understand the structure of your own network—is it open, is it closed—and the network of people around you.

Third, if we’re talking about getting ahead, making lots of money, does your net-work exhibit structural holes? If it doesn’t, are you lacking the diversity that you need? On the other hand, do you have a cohesive network around you of people who are going to support you, who have bought into your career and are going to help you? You need both cohesion, that closed network, and links outside of closed groups to get diversity. As you look around your organization, do you see this pattern of cohesion and diversity, so that there is both solidarity as well as new ideas being transferred?

Fourth, managers need to know about weak ties, which are important for seren-dipitous learning. Are you allowing some surprise into your life? Are you open to new information, new contacts? Are you always going the same route around the building? Are you always talking to the same people? Or are you going to meetings where perhaps you’ve never gone before? And keeping your eyes and ears open for new things, both in your own organizations and outside?

Source: Cross & Parker (2004). The hidden power of social networks:Understanding how work really gets done in organizations. Boston, MA: HarvardBusiness School Press; p.155 (Figure A-2).

= Sales

= Marketing= Research

Function

FIGURE 1. A Social Network Diagram



If we think networks

are important

for performance

and sharing best

practices to

become a global

organization, then

executives need to

know who the key

players are and

whether they’re in a

role that is enabling

others or potentially

constraining

others by hoarding

information.

Rob: I think the weak-tie idea is inter-esting, in part, because it helps in thinking about where benefit might accrue, or job opportunities might come, as Martin said. I also think there’s more work showing weak ties to be really important for best practice transfers, particularly if those weak ties can be trusted, which is kind of a fifth element I might throw in. There has been more and more work pointing to issues around trust, around energy, or other aspects of relation-ships that do have a pretty big impact. I think

of this as multiplexity. One of the common biases

out there, and it’s just a knee-jerk reaction that I think everybody has, is they hear the word collabo-ration and they think more is bet-ter. So, they think about matrix structures, they think about another Facebook implementa-tion inside their organization and other ways to instantaneously get to people. What I’m seeing is that these efforts drive phenomenal collaboration overload. So the structure of the network becomes important, in part in terms of the structural hole ideas that Martin outlined, but also just in a basic idea of alignment. Are the collab-orations you have supportive of your strategic objectives—if you’re trying to innovate in certain ways or go after certain markets, that sort of thing? More and more I see networks inside organizations overloaded at certain points—for example, the middle manager level or certain intersections in a matrix structure—and then too disconnected at key points leaders care about strategically for inno-

vation or best practice transfer.On cognition, I push managers and

executives on this quite a bit. I won’t have them do the cognitive social structure (Krackhardt, 1987) assessments because they take so long, but I’ll ask them to predict who their most connected people will be. The basic finding that I am able to show is that people

are pretty good at guessing the top 10, but then as they get down into the next layers, 20, 30, or maybe 40, their accuracy is dramat-ically off quite often. That gets worse if I ask them to guess who the brokers are or who is on the fringe of the network. If we think networks are important for performance and sharing best practices to become a global organization, then executives need to know who the key players are and whether they’re in a role that is enabling others or potentially constraining others by hoarding information. If executives are to get better leverage from their talent, it is important that they under-stand this and do not just rely on their own intuition of who’s important.

On the personality side, I think one of the opportunities is to broaden out our thinking about node characteristics in gen-eral. Personality is a part of it, but also tech-nical expertise, cultural values, perceptual ratings, things like that. In our different research streams in the consortium, we get a lot of traction from being able to show, for example, that culture is not so uniform as executives think. We can do the same thing on technical capabilities and see how distri-bution of competencies in a network help or hinder innovation.

We do see a lot of uptake on being able to show the importance of trust. For example, we’re looking at the top 5,000 right now in one of the major mergers in the pharmaceuti-cal sector. You can see that nine months in, when you look at competence-based trust in those networks, they are not getting the value they should be out of that merger. Not because they haven’t done all the formal alignment things, but because the key scien-tists don’t trust those from the other legacy organization. Certain interventions can be put in place when you see that as a leader—things that build trust, at really precise points in that network, where you care about groups coming together.

I’ve continued to see a huge impact from studying energy in networks. There are nine specific behaviors we know energizers tend to exhibit. And from a performance stand-point, we find that people who get included or onboarded rapidly in networks tend to be



Looking at centrality

gives executives the

opportunity to pay

attention to hidden

stars whom they

hadn’t been thinking

about before.

strong energizers, and that energy is associ-ated with predictors of performance and succession.

For me, this leads to the idea of multi-plexity. It helps to think about not just the information flow within groups but look-ing at other things like trust, energy, or even intimidation or fear. We’ve been mapping that where I can get it included. I don’t mean a physically-scared-of-you reaction. I mean a network question focused on holding back ideas when you’re in the presence of certain people, or not being willing to test fringe ideas on certain people. That’s been power-ful for seeing where companies aren’t getting the impact from their talent that they should because certain people or certain roles create an aura around them that suppresses ideas or information.

Martin: You mentioned multiplexity a few times and that is of interest to me because in my own research, I must say, I’ve found multiplexity to be disappointing. In other words, when looking at relationships when there’s more than one relation—let’s say friendship and advice—I haven’t found much evidence that multiplex relations have any predictive power over single relationships. But you think that is important?

Rob: I find the same thing. I’ve done work showing the components of the advice network (Cross & Sproull, 2004), but you end up with that problem of collinearity in it that makes it very difficult to tease these components apart in an individual predictive model. But my point here is that it is helpful to look at different network dimensions. You can find unique things when you’re looking at the trust network and looking at the fear network, which would be masked if you’re just assuming that any given relationship is good enough to show the structure.

Managing Networks of Others Within Businesses

Scholars have argued that managers can and should try to manage social connections in their organization (Davenport & Snyder, 2005). Business leaders are encouraged to promote healthy, productive connections within teams, to

bring the workforce closer to the top tier of the organization, to encourage business units to share information, and to integrate newly acquired units seamlessly (Ibarra & Hansen, 2011). Lengnick-Hall and Lengnick-Hall (2003) have argued that HR professionals are able not only to help build effective interactions within a firm, but that in doing so they can help turn social capital into competitive advantage. However, efforts to manage networks are often ad hoc. While man-agers want to encourage their staff to connect, it is not easy to specify who they should connect to and how to avoid being overloaded.

Guest Editors: You’ve talked about what you might say to managers about their own networks. In this special issue, we’re inter-ested in how people—line man-agers, HR managers—and HR policies and practices might be concerned with shaping the net-works in the organization. Do you think organizational networks can be managed?

Rob: I think they can be influ-enced. It’s very difficult to go out and say, “You have to be friends with this person.” That doesn’t tend to work, obviously. But in the work that I’ve been doing, there are three types of actionable insights and common intervention points that have shown out in almost every network we look at.

First, there is a disproportionate influence of certain people in the center of the net-work: those are high in indegree and eigen-vector centrality or other similar measures. Executives care very much about understand-ing this. What I tend to find is that of the peo-ple who are really enabling their colleagues to be successful—in other words, helping others to do good work—about 50 percent of them just haven’t been recognized. They are not in the top talent list; they are not known by the leaders or on their radar screen. So, for HR managers, that is a very important thing to know because these people are doing all this work and they’re not getting the rec-ognition. They tend to be the biggest flight risks. Looking at centrality gives executives the opportunity to pay attention to hidden



Even without using

network analysis

to produce a full-

blown X-ray of the

organization, you

can systematically

keep things active

by putting different

types of people

on project teams,

moving people

around, having a

much more fluid sort

of organization, and

making sure that

you have buildings

where the paths

tend to bring people

together.

stars whom they hadn’t been thinking about before.

And then, of course, the other side of network centrality is the danger of overload. Leaders who are not able to let go, or who get too consumed and are invisibly slowing others down, or outdated role definitions or decision rights that are driving too much of a demand on certain points in the network that slow others down unintentionally. That can be an opportunity to look at role defi-nitions and other things to alleviate central

overload points.Second, on the fringe we can

do a lot to help onboard people. So, we’ll always profile the fast movers, those people who get connected quickly and then try to understand how they manage their network. I’ve interviewed them to see what was unique about their onboarding experi-ence so that we can replicate that for others to get people engaged.

Third, we use density tables (see Table I for an example) to find potential silos in the network, whether across functional or geo-graphic lines, or different product offerings or expertise domains. Looking at density by attribute has been powerful in helping executives see five or six points in the network that, if they don’t get better collaboration across subgroups, will undermine them strategically. They are able to use that to put in place rotation pro-grams or internal committees or things that bring people together in a very targeted way at those junctures.

Martin: There’s also the aca-demic literature, going back to Tom Allen and other pioneers (Allen, 1984), who’ve long been talking about how organizations can manage networks, including

things like architecture of the building, the set-up of corridors and offices so that peo-ple bump into each other (see also Sailer &

McCulloh, 2012, for a recent study on spatial configuration and social interaction). Even without using network analysis to produce a full-blown X-ray of the organization, you can systematically keep things active by putting different types of people on project teams, moving people around, having a much more fluid sort of organization, and making sure that you have buildings where the paths tend to bring people together. You can make strategic job appointments; you can appoint task forces. Krackhardt and Stern (1988) were talking about some of this 20, 30 years ago as well.

A lot of relationship development is actu-ally (physical) proximity. People will tend to become close to those they interact with, whether they are located close to each other in the building or on the same floor or theybump into each other in meetings, or they have meals together, these kinds of things. The natural tendency or drift is for people within units to become cohesive and to ignore, or to not have the time for, connect-ing across units. And then that leads to prob-lems of coordination, especially in moments of crisis. So, the organization can try to pro-vide systematically opportunities for people to have these kinds of close encounters.

One has to accept some haphazardness in the process and some serendipity. Because, otherwise, there is a danger that the organi-zational manager thinks he or she is all wise, and even if they have the benefit of these net-work diagrams (see Figure 1), they may make

T A B L E I A Density Table*

From Marketing Sales Research

Marketing 83% 5% 6%

Sales 0% 46% 0%

Research 6% 2% 38%

Source: Cross, R., & Parker, A. (2004). The hidden power of

social networks: Understanding how work really gets done in

organizations. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press;

p. 159 (Table A-3).

*A table representing the number of ties in a network divided

by the maximum number of all possible ties (usually within and

between organizational units).



Sometimes people

literally never get

out of their office

because they

have no time. So

the likelihood that

they’re going to

form networks, let

alone serendipitous

networks, is low.

big mistakes. Even if one does these network diagrams, you cannot assume that they reveal everything or that they can necessarily be the blueprint for organizational change. The idea that one can design optimally the network of specific people or specific roles, and then leave it, is a mistake.

Guest Editors: So, it seems that there are some things to avoid, but it’s not neces-sarily possible to prescribe how things should be. Earlier Rob commented that we assume more collaboration is better. If the options available to HR managers are to keep some-thing dynamic going, keep reshaping teams, keep drawing in people who are perceived to be peripheral, they’re creating a lot of oppor-tunities for people to add connections. But there’s still that question about efficiency and balancing the number of connections with rewards and benefits that they bring.

Rob: We will look at certain ways of mov-ing decision rights to help avoid overload on a small set of people or a small set of roles. We map decision-making interactions and then ask what percentage of these interactions is routine. A lot of times we can isolate trivial decisions where somebody 20 years ago made some mistake and it has become policy in the organization. When HR managers see what is consuming time in the network and the cost that incurs, they very often will revise poli-cies, create other go-to people, reset thresh-olds on certain decision-escalation processes, and take other actions to help reduce interac-tions in the network.

I’m coming at this from a perspective of when I’ve done a network analysis and we can kind of dig down in there, but I don’t think you need network analyses to get some of these ideas. Of course, what you don’t want to do is just rely on the individual perceptions of a leader. You want to get them into a group that can triangulate different perspectives and awareness of the network, some sort of group, that’s asking: Where do the silos exist? Where do we think the interactions are that are consuming too much time?

Martin: I agree with that. You can sim-ulate a network analysis by letting people talk about their relationships. In this way, you can come to a consensus as to who the

key players are, how they are connected, etc. Actually, you can see in some of the cognitive social structure data that by taking a few of the actors and pulling their data, you actually do come to a reasonable, accurate map of the network. So, that’s true. It’s a different way to do it, without all the technology of network research perhaps.

Another thing that HR managers can do to encourage healthy networks and organiza-tions is to provide some time for people to get together. We talked about geography of space, but there is also time. Sometimes people liter-ally never get out of their office because they have no time. So the likelihood that they’re going to form networks, let alone serendipi-tous networks, is low. One of the keys to managing excessive col-laboration or just excessive net-working is to emphasize weak ties that don’t require lots of time to maintain—people you’re friendly with that you get in touch with occasionally. That works pretty well in some cultures like the United States, but I suspect it may not work so well in thick trust societies of Asia. That is perhaps a cultural difference. Certainly Americans and I think British are very familiar with the idea of acquaintances, who are helpful to each other but don’t necessarily need to take each other to dinner and remember each other’s birth-days and so on. Nor do they have to have been to middle school together or any of that kind of stuff. Whereas, in Korea and Japan, where those things seem to be more important, it’s more difficult to maintain a network of weak ties that is help-ful. That is my impression.

Guest Editors: Rob, what does your work with organizations outside Western Europe and North America suggest about cul-tural differences?

Rob: We’ve done assessments of compa-nies that have pockets in China or all over the world. And we’ve done research in compa-nies that are headquartered in Japan, Korea, France, Germany, Scandinavian countries,



If compensation

schemes focus

leaders parochially

on their own units,

then it seems that

no matter how

much they might

encourage people

to reach out or test

innovative ideas

across divisions,

they just don’t get it.

and South America. We’ll always map both competence- and benevolence-based trust if we can. When we look at the density of con-nections by country, in general we find thatcross-country trust exists. The one place that we have seen less of this is with China for some reason—both in terms of trusting relations with each other as well as with other countries. This is a pattern that we’ve seen in four or five places over the past couple of years. It’s intriguing.

Martin: In some research comparing U.S. and Chinese networks, we looked at the extent to which the network of people you compete with is different from the network of people you cooperate with. We found a

systematic difference between U.S. managers and Chinese man-agers. In the U.S., those networks tend to be distinct. That follows indeed from the idea that, for people in the U.S., cooperation is quite different from competi-tion; you don’t tend to cooperate with your competitors. Whereas, in China, you see that the people they compete with tend to be the same people they cooperate with. Both cognitively and in network terms, you see an overlap. That is, it’s much more possible for the Chinese to think that cooperation and competition are compatible with each other.

Guest Editors: Are there other contextual factors apart from culture that you think really strongly affect networks, that researchers should be aware of?

Martin: Well, the gender makeup of the organization may be impor-tant. In some other research that I’m doing on work teams, we find stereotypes with respect to the kind of network roles that women can play versus men. For example, women who take on brokerage roles are somewhat defy-ing the stereotype. Burt’s work offered the puzzle of why women don’t benefit from bro-kerage in the same way that men do (Burt, 1998). Well, if you can imagine a work team where these network stereotypes are quite

embedded, that will tend to affect the perfor-mance of the team as a whole, as well as the performance of individuals. So, that’s kind of a contextual thing, a product of how many women there are in the group versus how many men. That may also be true of minori-ties and new hires that Burt (1992) referred to as lacking legitimacy in these high-powered kind of investment banking organizations he was looking at.

Rob: Contextually I find that formal structure always has a lot to do with who’s interacting with whom. I know that there was early work by Bill Stevenson and others that was really trying to push that idea (Stevenson, 1986). A recent article by Soda and Zaheer (2012) has brought that up again. The second thing on this—which is very much in the control of HR people—is how people are paid. If they are paid in a way that incents them to interact at a divisional level, then that tends to be what you get in the network patterns across functional, divisional, or geographic lines. If compensation schemes focus leaders parochially on their own units, then it seems that no matter how much they might encour-age people to reach out or test innovative ideas across divisions, they just don’t get it.

In some places, the formal structure has a significant effect on conditioning network interactions and in others less so. Often this is very counterintuitive. The military organi-zations that we’ve done network assessments in have far more fluid networks at a lower level and greater collaborations across organi-zational lines than places like the consulting firms. Consultancies claim to be networked organizations and yet, in the way they are paid, people are actually very focused on their partner’s objectives, and so the networks often become very siloed.

So I consistently and robustly see differ-ent aspects of formal structure having a great deal to do with interaction patterns in orga-nizations along with culture and physical lay-out. Unfortunately, this is a body of work that is more difficult to theorize about and so has not received as much attention in scholar-ship. If nothing else, at least in terms of con-trol variables in models, this is something I really hope we see more of in the future.



Unfortunately,

academic

training has often

emphasized

individual

achievement, and

models of HR tended

to be based on this.

It requires a change

in one’s thinking to

see the world as an

interactive arena.

The Social Network Perspective in the HR Arena

In addition to formal structure, culture, and lead-ership, human resource management is another contextual factor that can contribute to develop-ment of social networks in organizations (Brass, 1995; Collins & Clark, 2003; Kaše, Paauwe, & Zupan, 2009). In fact, the idea that people man-agement and patterns of relationships at work are strongly interrelated goes back to the Human Relations movement. Among HR scholars, Tichy and Fombrun (1979) discussed social network analysis in organizations just a couple of years before publishing their seminal SHRM model (Tichy, Fombrun, & Devanna, 1982). So why has knowledge been percolating into the HRM arena so slowly? It is still very difficult for an HR practi-tioner to be systematically exposed to this content, as there are hardly any HRM textbooks covering networks, and social network courses have only now started to appear on the curricula. It might well be that, by being preoccupied by industrial relations and formal employment relationships and practices, HRM scholars have not given enough attention to what is going on under the surface (Lengnick-Hall & Lengnick-Hall, 2003).

Guest Editors: Do you think that under-standing social networks, their dynamics, how they play out, is something that is fun-damental to understanding human resource management and its effectiveness? Are we going in the right direction by pushing for a social network perspective on this? And where can it most add value?

Martin: I think it is fundamental. I think human beings are gregarious, interac-tive creatures, and human resource manage-ment is about the management of people in collectives such as work organizations. Unfortunately, academic training has often emphasized individual achievement, and models of HR tended to be based on this. It requires a change in one’s thinking to see the world as an interactive arena where the value of the work being produced is a function of collaboration and social connectivity, as well as the particular skills, abilities, and charac-teristics of individuals. So, it’s not that one should ignore the traditional HR practices, but I do think it takes a revolution in thinking

to move to this network view of HR systems. The legal basis of HR tends to be individual, so there is a lot of system bias against under-standing the fundamental importance of the social network perspective in HR. Many of the pieces are in place: people are thinking about leadership, performance, mentoring, coop-eration, and so on, but they all tend to be in boxes. If you zoom out and think of all these as aspects of the social network within which we’re embedded, which is dynamic and evolving, and which victimizes some people, while it promotes and facilitates the efforts of others, then that is a fundamentally different way of looking at things. It’s going to take a while, and it may just be that one needs to keep re-emphasizing it.

One of the contextual things that we haven’t mentioned is organization culture. There are organizational cultures that really do promote a kind of interactiv-ity and a social networking kind of zeitgeist. And there are other cultures where you shut your door, and sit in your cubicle and you don’t trust the others around you. And you don’t want to share because you’re being evaluated solely on your own productivity. Those kinds of systems would tend to mitigate against the importance of collaboration and cooperation.

So, I think it’s fundamental but it’s poorly understood. For both academics and practitioners, there’s a real challenge to make this kind of transformative shift, where they suddenly see the world as a connected web.

Rob: Barry Wellman used to tell me the same thing. It’s a very different way of thinking about the world, about issues and problems that leaders experience. I find that personally when I’m interacting with compa-nies and executives, some people get the net-work analysis and implications immediately and they gravitate to solutions, while for oth-ers it’s a tough transition to begin thinking about the world in an interconnected way. I see this in leadership programs and all sorts of



I think it’s a bit

dangerous to

either emphasize

completely individual

talent and qualities

or to say those are

not important at all

and it’s merely the

connections among

people that are

important.

other interactions I have with leaders around network research where a large portion of the leaders gets really engaged in this idea that a part of a person’s productivity is a product of their network. Others will continue to come back and say no—it’s individual aspirations, it’s resilience, it’s this other stuff.

Guest Editors: Are there any issues, any caveats, things that researchers and practition-ers should be careful about when applying that socially connected view of the world?

Martin: Social network research, in gen-eral, is getting better, in the sense that it is now realizing that there is a place for indi-vidual aspiration and talent and personal-ity. For a while, and perhaps still pervasive

in sociological quarters, there was a denial that the individual is of any importance whatsoever (Mayhew, 1980). The emphasis is completely on the connections. It’s neither one nor the other; it’s the connected web of singu-lar and unique individuals who don’t give up their individuality because they are connected to networks. On the contrary, much as Georg Simmel (1955) reminded us years ago, to some extent your individuality and your unique-ness only develops through the set of connections that you are at the center of. So, individual unique-ness and connectivity are com-plementary. And they are both parts of the puzzle. I think it’s a bit dangerous to either emphasize

completely individual talent and qualities or to say those are not important at all and it’s merely the connections among people that are important.

Rob: There does seem, to me at least, to be a base assumption not only that more col-laboration is better, but also that networks are universally positive. And yet we can see in Joe Labianca’s work (see Labianca & Brass, 2006; Labianca, Brass, & Gray, 1998) that there is a negative effect, too. I think we need to begin factoring negative ties into our models given the disproportionate impact that negative ties often have.

Relationships Through the Eyes of Social Networking Sites

A recent study by Pew Internet (Hampton, Sessions Goulet, Rainie, & Purcell, 2011) estab-lished that nearly half of adults (47 percent) in the United States, or 59 percent of Internet users, use at least one of the social networking sites (SNSs). This rise offers great opportunities for individuals’ work life and companies. On pro-fessional SNSs, individuals can now network in social arenas that used to be out of their reach, develop their personal brand, and have a much better overview of their connections. At the same time, companies, according to a recent BCG study in collaboration with EAPM (Strack et al., 2011), find it increasingly helpful to use SNSs for employment branding as well as recruitment, screening, and onboarding of talent. But along-side the opportunities come risks and challenges. As the use of SNSs at work has soared, many organizations, afraid of confidential informa-tion leaks and effective work-time losses, have reacted by controlling or even banning the use of social media in the workplace. Privacy concerns related to organizations demanding SNS pass-words from their applicants or forcing them to “friend” one of the corporate SNS entities have in the United States culminated in the introduc-tion of the Social Networking Online Protection Act in April 2012. And then there is the issue of balance between face-to-face and virtual rela-tionships. As Sherry Turkle, once a firm believer in “life on the screen,” establishes in her recent book Alone Together (2011), mobile devices in combination with SNSs encourage people to stay in touch and “expect more from technology and less from each other.”

Guest Editors: One of the things that recently struck me is that there is no lon-ger a small elite group of people studying social networks. Everybody has the facility to easily visualize and study their personal social network (e.g., InMap application in LinkedIn and MyFnetwork application for Facebook), meaning that we all have the opportunity to think about who’s in and who’s out of our networks. What does that mean for organizational network research, now that we have a world of practitioners out there? How should we respond as scholars? What are your



I think the savvy

networkers are

going to be those

who manage

their electronic

connections, their

virtual connections,

but who also

keep their key

contacts very much

attached and in

touch with them

through personal

engagement,

and who leave

themselves open

to new contacts

through the kind

of serendipitous

networking.

thoughts about the impact of this changing world of social media?

Martin: I have the feeling that it’s still developing as to how useful and valuable these data are in terms of research and under-standing. A lot of the social network research traditionally has been focused on face-to-face, interpersonal, co-located kinds of net-works. Then it developed also to include more types of email and virtual networks, and now Facebook, etc. However, I think people are having a hard time figuring out what to do with those data. To the extent that the data represent a vast draw of your connections from your grade school on, through college, a mass of 700 or larger groups of people, there’s a lot of noise in there.

To the extent that people are neglecting their face-to-face contacts, they are mak-ing grave errors. I think the savvy network-ers are going to be those who manage their electronic connections, their virtual connec-tions, but who also keep their key contacts very much attached and in touch with them through personal engagement, and who leave themselves open to new contacts through the kind of serendipitous networking.

I think in some ways interpersonal con-nectivity is going to become something of a luxury. And so we’re going to find that peo-ple who don’t have any time are going to rely more and more on social media, but that at the very high end of valuable networking, we’re going to see an emphasis on personal connections. So, it’s going to become, like in many other areas of life, inequality, moving into a world where everybody has access tosocial media but only the few have access to the time it takes to develop and nurture interpersonal relations.

Rob: What I found interesting, from research in one of the top consulting organi-zations, is that the virtual workers are OK at getting information from other people, but where they really suffer is the deeper things—the career advice, the personal support, the things that actually turn out to be very pre-dictive of engagement scores or other mea-sures of satisfaction or well-being.

The balance between virtual and face-to-face interaction is probably something that

the network field could really have a nice impact on for HR audiences. Helping them to think about the right staging of face-to-face interactions is important so that they can get this right in a world where it’s not economically feasible for people to be together all the time.

Facebook and LinkedIn have taken at least an initial step to help people see their networks. It does help you connect with people whom you wouldn’t bump into necessarily and help you find people with similar interests and profiles. But something that is a real possi-bility for a Facebook or a LinkedIn is to ask: What does a good network look like? For example, to provide some guidance about where you are becoming overly biased by lis-tening to a certain set of people that are not helping you grow. From my perspective, a very real detriment of all the media tools is the phenom-enal relationship overload that it creates on people.

Ethical Considerations in Organizational Network AnalysisOrganizational network analysis is a powerful tool, but one that by its very nature is exposed to ethical chal-lenges beyond those associated with more traditional research designs (cf. Borgatti & Molina, 2003). It can-not guarantee anonymity to respon-dents during the data-collection stage, because for meaningful data one needs to know who the respon-dent is and with whom s/he reported having a relational tie. Respondents who refuse to participate could still be included due to nomi-nation by others. The content of relationships studied can also be controversial; analyses can include queries about friendship or dislike, which could be considered as stepping over the line between professional and private. Researchers and consultants thus frequently find themselves in situations where the question of who will get



No matter what

you say to a person

about the reasons

somebody may be

peripheral—they

may be an expert,

they may be dealing

with quality of work-

life issues—this

becomes a point of

data that’s lodged in

their minds that can

be used against this

person.

access to results and in which format becomes an important issue (Kadushin, 2005). The output of a social network analysis of an organization is usually very detailed information about social connections between individuals, which can be a highly valuable resource for political maneuvering (Krackhardt, 1990). At the same time, a complete social network analysis of an organization can-not be done properly without a very high response rate of the organizational members.

Guest Editors: For network researchers, what are the implications of collecting net-work data and particularly doing the kinds of interventions we have been talking about?

Rob: I would urge anybody to be aware of the power of the network information at

its most granular level of seeing names in a network diagram. We never share named network dia-grams with organizations or any-thing that identifies a person at all unless we have communicated with that person ahead of time to make sure they approve. But for leaders it becomes very seductive when you give any sort of feedback to a com-pany—they will see density tables, heat maps, and other group visu-alizations and then immediately push you to then show names. And so up front you’ve got to make a clear contract with them that says, this is the kind of feed-back I’m going to give you and the kind that we won’t share. And I’ll even tell them, here’s the kind of things you’re going to push me for, and the kind of thing I’m going to say no to in three or four months’ time. We’ll joke about it, but you have to be ready for that.

As an example, I can’t think of anybody who hasn’t asked me

to tell them who the de-energizers are. And I say, “Absolutely not. I can talk to you about certain things that create energy and ways we might build that into teaming workshops or help leaders reflect on their own behaviors. But we’re not going to go down the road of identifying individual people on this front. We’re also not going to focus on who’s on

the periphery.” No matter what you say to a person about the reasons somebody may be peripheral—they may be an expert, they may be dealing with quality of work-life issues—this becomes a point of data that’s lodged in their minds that can be used against this person.

In general, be very clear on what kind of information you’ll share and what kind you won’t. And be very clear with the survey par-ticipants: that they can opt out if they want, who will see this information, and how it will be used.

If we secure the person’s permission ahead of time, we may go back and show a com-pany that if Sue has been indicated 43 times in a network survey, she is a critical source of information for people all over the orga-nization. That’s valuable for the company toknow. It’s good for Sue for the company to know. But what I never show is who said that about Sue, whether it’s positive or nega-tive. I never show Sue the diagram that shows Bob said this about her. If we’re going to show the 20 most central people to executives or managers, we email each of those people beforehand and make sure it’s OK.

Martin: I agree that one should not reveal the identity of anybody in the network, unless one has the specific permission of that per-son. Because otherwise it seems to me a viola-tion of the basic psychological contract that one has with one’s research subjects. There are some special issues about social network research, especially where you’re asking peo-ple about other people or people’s names are on a list, even if they haven’t agreed. Because with a roster method, you ask the individ-ual respondent who are you friends with, let’s say, and then you have a list of people.

Well, some of those people may not want to participate in the research, and never-theless their names are there on the roster. Because you’ve included that person in that roster, you find things out about that per-son, even if that individual doesn’t respond. So you have in a sense collected information about them. And from that you can recon-struct their network actually.

So, that’s a little bit different from other types of research that people do. I think it



A complete

understanding of the

social and human

fabric of a business

demands that we

see the world as

an interactive

arena where the

value of the work

being produced

is a function of

collaboration and

social connectivity,

as well as the

skills, abilities, and

characteristics of

individuals.

does add in a slightly different wrinkle, which I don’t quite know what to do about. Because if we have to say, well, we have to have per-mission from everybody just to even include their name, that provides too much of a bar-rier, it seems to me. So, that’s an ethical issue which is very little discussed.

It’s very important that network research-ers, as indeed other researchers in Europe, go through an institutional review process. Just so they have some oversight as to what they are doing. Because otherwise we’re in danger of being cowboys out there at the frontier, and endangering our respondents and indeed endangering the kind of research we are able to do in companies.

Discussion: Using Social Network Research in HRM

One of the themes to emerge from our con-versation between a leading practitioner of organizational network analysis and a re-searcher at the forefront of academic work was that there is a way of seeing and thinking about the world that is fundamental to HRM but poorly understood by HR scholars and practitioners. That way of seeing has different names—such as a “social network perspec-tive” or “organizational network analysis”—but it has one very powerful message: a com-plete understanding of the social and human fabric of a business demands that we see the world as an interactive arena where the value of the work being produced is a function of collaboration and social connectivity, as well as the skills, abilities, and characteristics of individuals. By being conversant in the vo-cabulary and applied tools of this way of thinking, we are able to understand and talk about how value is produced collectively; to examine the social causes and effects of pro-ductivity, innovation, and well-being; and to recognize that business performance is not just a function of capable people and supe-rior practices and processes, but also the product of relationships and connections. Here, we make some suggestions about how researchers and practitioners might become better able to engage in this dialogue together.

First, we suggest that HR practitioners become familiar with important concepts from organizational network research—weak ties, structural holes, brokerage, cohesion, and multiplexity (see the Appendix). People who think in terms of social networks and relations understand and frequently apply these terms. They are familiar with the key theories and findings from research about personality types and strategies associated with effective networks, and specific net-work configurations that are associated with particular performance outcomes. By famil-iarizing themselves with these concepts, HR practition ers will not only be able to collabo-rate with organizational network experts, but could also generate their own cre-ative solutions by being exposed to an alternative perspective.

Second, HR managers and HR specialists could also benefit from a practical knowledge of some of the tools of applied network research discussed in this article, including density tables, central-ity measures, and social network visualizations. Identifying who is central in a network; mapping decision-making interactions; spot-ting people who are overloaded; looking for silos between func-tions, teams, or divisions; man-aging the physical layout of the workplace; and making time for serendipitous interactions and the development of weak ties could all be valuable options for analyz-ing and later attempting to influ-ence the networks of interactions in their businesses. In doing so, however, they need to be mindful of Martin Kilduff’s caveat that it is a mistake to think you can design an optimal network. It’s more about making informed decisions that will trigger certain social interaction dynamics than being able to engineer connections.

Here, researchers and orga-nization network specialists could make the lives of HR professionals easier by coming up



Any efforts to

understand and

influence who

interacts with

whom, and how

they interact, must

be cognizant of

the variations in

motivations and

expectations that

arise from context.

with solutions that do not take so much time and effort as complete social network analysis but still result in a valid and reliable represen-tation of an organization’s social structure, especially for large organizations. Some ideas that were discussed here—systematic work-shops on social networks and relationships at work, developing a consensus map of an orga-nization’s social structure as seen by selected key informants, determining meaningful boundaries of organizational network analysis before engaging in it—could already address this challenge. Emerging work at the fron-tiers of network methods using affiliation/co-occurrence network data (Field, Frank, Schiller, Riegle-Crumb, & Muller, 2006) and

(snowball) network sampling (Pattison, Robins, Snijders, & Wang, 2012) could make com-plete social network analysis even more attractive in the future.

Further, our conversation has highlighted some insights that both practitioners and researchers should tune into. First, the shap-ing of relations and networks is affected by context: factors dis-cussed here include national and societal differences, the demo-graphic composition of teams, the formal structure of the organiza-tion, and reward practices. Any efforts to understand and influ-ence who interacts with whom, and how they interact, must be cognizant of the variations in motivations and expectations that

arise from context. Second, the networked way of thinking is a useful counterpoint to the individualized approach that has been dominant in the HR field for decades. It is, of course, important to think about employ-ment, talent, performance, and success in terms of individual attributes and obligations,

but also helpful to overlay this with a focus on networks and relationships. Third, in both research and practice, there are opportunities to help people and businesses make effec-tive use of social networking sites, as these absorb increasing amounts of attention and are ever more vigorously pursued as channels for recruitment, job seeking, business genera-tion, and influence.

Finally, the ethical and moral dimensions of social network research, and the psycho-logical contracts that researchers and con-sultants establish with respondents, merit scrutiny from the very beginning of a net-work research project. For researchers, ques-tions about who has access to data and in what format and for what purpose should be tackled during an institutional ethical review process of their research projects. Consultants should think about this when preparing their business proposals and stipulating reporting arrangements. Failure to address these issues properly could jeopardize future research possibilities on networks in organizational settings as well as development of an increas-ingly popular consulting niche.

This conversation, together with the other contributions in this special issue, has identified the profound importance of social network perspectives for the day-to-day practicalities of managing people. We have highlighted directions for integrating network theories, concepts, methods, and analytical techniques with more traditional approaches to research. Bridging research and practice in organizational network analysis is not only valuable but essential to effective understanding of the social dynam-ics of work. We hope that this conversation and the special issue will serve to (re)empha-size the need to balance our attention to people and to their relationships as we aspire for performance and well-being in today’s organizations.

ROB CROSS, DBA, is an associate professor of management in the McIntire School of

Commerce. His research focuses on knowledge creation and sharing and specifi cally

how relationships and informal networks in organizations can provide competitive ad-

vantage in knowledge-intensive work. Ideas emerging from this work have resulted in

three books, seven book chapters, and more than 40 articles, some of which have won



awards at the Academy of Management. In addition to top scholarly outlets, his work has

been featured in such venues as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review,

California Management Review, Academy of Management Executive, and Organizational

Dynamics.

ROBERT KAŠE is an associate professor of management in the Faculty of Economics of

the Department of Management and Organization at the University of Ljubljana, and as-

sociate editor of Human Resource Management. His current research interests include

the HRM-performance link, social networks, careers, and knowledge transfer. His work

has appeared in journals like Human Resource Management, the International Journal of

Human Resource Management, the International Journal of Manpower, and Organization

Science. He supports interaction between research and practice and is strongly involved

in the Slovenian HR Association.

MARTIN KILDUFF (PhD, Cornell, 1988) is a professor of organizational behavior at

University College London, former editor of Academy of Management Review (2006–

2008), and currently associate editor of Administrative Science Quarterly. Prior to joining

UCL, he served as the Diageo Professor of Management Studies at Cambridge University,

and prior to that he served on the faculties of University of Texas at Austin, Penn State, and

INSEAD. His work focuses on social networks and includes the coauthored books Social

Networks and Organizations (Sage, 2003) and Interpersonal Networks in Organizations:

Cognition, Personality, Dynamics and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

ZELLA KING is an associate professor in the Henley Business School, with research in-

terests in career, innovation, and networks. In 2007 she was awarded a fellowship of

the Advanced Institute of Management Research. She now focuses on consultancy and

executive teaching, helping executives, managers, and entrepreneurs use their person-

al networks to speed up problem solving and innovation. She also works with Know

Innovation, a consultancy that aims to accelerate innovation in science. King holds a PhD

in occupational psychology from Birkbeck College, London. Before joining the academic

world, she worked as a consultant for Accenture and as a corporate fi nance executive for

the investment bank Schroders.

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GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Brokerage (broker)—The opportunity or act of moving any kind of assets (e.g., informa-tion) between otherwise disconnected contacts. A broker is an actor that due to her/his special position in a social network controls the flows between the disconnected actors (cf. Burt, 1992).

Centrality—The extent to which an actor occupies a central position in the network in one of the following ways: having many direct ties to others (degree centrality), being able to reach many others directly or indirectly (closeness centrality), being an intermediary on paths between actors (betweenness centrality), or having connections to centrally located oth-ers (eigenvector centrality) (Freeman, 1979).

Cognitive social structure—The perception of a social structure (i.e., social ties between selected pairs of actors) by an observer. By looking at aggregated cognitive social structures collected from multiple observers, we can obtain a consensus social structure (cf. Krackhardt, 1987).

(Network) cohesion—The extent to which a relationship between two actors is sur-rounded by strong third-party ties. Cohesion builds social norms and trust, fosters cooperation, and imposes social control (cf. Reagans & McEvily, 2003).

Complete social network—A finite set of actors and relational ties among them (cf. Wasserman & Faust, 1994).

Multiplexity—The extent to which a link between two actors serves a “multiplicity of interests” (Barnes, 1979) or a tendency for two or more relations of different types (e.g., friend-ship, work collaboration) to link the same pair of actors (Koehly & Pattison, 2005).

Personal social network (ego network)—The social network around the focal actor (i.e., ego). It consists of a focal actor, a set of alters (i.e., actors with whom the focal actor has ties), and ties between the focal actor and alters along with ties among the alters themselves.

Roster method—A data-acquisition method where respondents are asked to select a num-ber of names (contacts) with whom they have a specific relation from a list prepared in advance by a researcher or consultant (see Marsden, 2011).

Structural hole—The separation between nonredundant contacts (Burt, 1992) or “a gap between two actors or two clusters of actors (A and B) that can be spanned by another actor, who may thereby become the only member to belong to A and B (if they are clusters) or who serves as the only intermediary between A and B” (Kilduff & Tsai, 2005).

Weak tie—An infrequent and distant tie that bridges structural holes and connects distal social worlds (cf. Granovetter, 1973).

A P P E N D I X

Documents

Bridging the Gap between Research and Practice in Organizational Network Analysis: A Conversation between Rob Cross and Martin Kilduff