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For roughly the past 25 years, scholars' interest in networking has been growing, particularly in the career literature. In line with theories on boundaryless (Arthur, 1994) and protean careers (Hall et al., 2018), scholars have shown that networking represents an important career self-management strategy (Sturges et al., 2010) or competency (Akkermans et al., 2012). In fact, networking is positively associated with career outcomes such as salary (Ng and Feldman, 2014a), promotions (Forret and Dougherty, 2004) or career satisfaction (Ng and Feldman, 2014b). The field has also developed several research streams concerning the antecedents of networking. For example, Gibson et al. (2014) distinguished individual antecedents (e.g. personality: Wolff and Kim, 2012; lay theories: Kuwabara et al., 2018), job characteristics (e.g. job level: Michael and Yukl, 1993) and organizational antecedents (e.g. organizational culture) of networking.
With the research on antecedents mounting, we suggest that it is time to go beyond narrative reviews and set out to summarize the field by means of meta-analysis. Specifically, the relationship between personality and networking has attracted the most research, whereas there are only a handful of studies concerning job and organizational antecedents (e.g. the reviews of Gibson et al., 2014; Wolff et al., 2008). Studies on personality traits converge on some findings, such as a positive relationship between networking and extraversion, but remain inconclusive with regard to others (e.g. conscientiousness). Moreover, reviews have mainly focused on the five-factor model (FFM, the “Big Five”) of personality, giving little attention to a broad range of other traits that scholars examined in networking research. Thus, our knowledge appears somewhat fragmented concerning the overall relationship of some traits, such as locus of control (LOC; Sturges et al., 2010). In addition, some of these traits (e.g. creativity, Van Dam et al., 2010) represent facets of the FFM and may be integrated into the FFM framework (i.e., openness to experience), while others, the so-called compound traits (Credé et al., 2016; Connelly et al., 2018), represent specific combinations of the five factors. For example, proactive personality, which several studies have linked to networking behaviors (Byrne et al., 2008; Eby et al., 2003), is a compound of extraversion, conscientiousness and openness to experience (Connelly et al.,...