Power, Status and Network Perceptions: The Effects of Network Bias on Organizational Outcomes
Abstract
Knowing who is connected to whom is important in organizations, but people make mistakes when attempting to recall and report connections among others in their social networks. We investigate how power and status influence the extent to which people rely on mental templates (schemas) in observing and responding to social networks at work. The first paper comprises two separate but related studies using original data collected for this project concerning misperceptions of friendship networks (study 1) and misperceptions of advice networks (study 2). In this first paper, we investigate how individuals' personal sense of power leads to distorted perceptions of social networks and the tendency to think these distorted networks are easily mobilized in pursuit of goals. In the second paper (based on archival data), we investigate how individuals systematically misperceive the pecking order in organizational friendship networks. Individuals who were in actual fact central players in the network tended to overestimate the extent of status differentiation. The more individuals perceived status differentiation, the less they found their jobs in the organization satisfying.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 2012
- Accession Number
- ADA566594
Entities
People
- Martin J. Kilduff
Organizations
- University of Cambridge