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A field study involving 190 employees in 38 work groups representing five diverse organizations provided evidence that social networks, as defined in terms of both positive and negative relations, are related to both individual and group performance. As hypothesized, individual job performance was positively related to centrality in advice networks and negatively related to centrality in hindrance networks composed of relationships tending to thwart task behaviors. Hindrance network density was significantly and negatively related to group performance.
A growing body of management theory and research takes as its central premise the embeddedness (Granovetter, 1985) of individuals in social networks. The distinctive characteristic of this stream of research lies in how it draws on the structural properties of social networks in explaining outcomes. From this perspective, individuals' positions within social networks confer advantages, such as organizational assimilation (Sparrowe & Liden, 1997) and promotions (Burt, 1992), or lead to disadvantages, such as organizational exit (Krackhardt & Porter, 1986). Centrality, the extent to which a given individual is connected to others in a network, is the structural property most often associated with instrumental outcomes, including power (Brass, 1984), influence in decision making (Friedkin, 1993), and innovation (Ibarra, 1993).
Although previous research has demonstrated a relationship between network structure and instrumental outcomes, relatively few studies have explicitly examined the link between network centrality and job performance. Baldwin, Bedell, and Johnson (1997) found a positive relationship between the network centrality of master of business administration (M.B.A.) team members and their grades. Brass (1981) found that the centrality of employees' positions in a network representing the flow of work was indirectly related to job performance via job characteristics. Thus, one purpose of the current study was to replicate and extend previous research on the relationship between an individual's network position within a work group and his or her job performance by examining the role of informal network position in actual work settings.
A related issue is whether group performance is a function of the structure of informal relationships within groups. Although the relationship between group interaction and performance has been the subject of considerable previous research, structure has largely been viewed in terms of formal relationships rather than informal interaction patterns (Guzzo & Shea, 1992). An important exception is group...