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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 structurally advantageous positions in organizational networks? Second, how do indegree centrality and brokerage compare in explaining job performance and career success? Third, how do these personality variables and network positions relate to work outcomes? Our results show that self-monitoring predicted indegree centrality (across expressive and instrumental networks) and brokerage (in expressive networks) after controlling for the Big Five traits. Self-monitoring, therefore, was especially relevant for understanding why people differ in their acquisition of advantageous positions in social networks. But the total variance explained by personality ranged between 3% and 5%. Surprisingly, we found that indegree centrality was more strongly related to job performance and career success than brokerage. We also found that personality predicted job performance and career success above and beyond network position and that network position partially mediated the effects of certain personality variables on work outcomes. This paper provides an integrated view of how an individual’s personality and network position combine to influence job performance and career success.

PurposeThis paper aims to analyze the extent to which the influence of external knowledge search activities on firms’ incremental innovation capability, and the moderating roles of the relatedness between the partners’ technological bases and a firm’s network embeddedness in the innovation network.Design/methodology/approachIn this empirical research, the authors collected a sample of patents in the UAV industry over the period of 2004–2018. Then the authors examined the direct role of external knowledge search on firms’ incremental innovation capability and the joint moderating effects of technological proximity and network embeddedness.FindingsWe found that external knowledge search in innovation networks positively affects firms’ incremental innovation capability. Moreover, we discovered that high technological proximity to other peers positively strengthens the impact of firms’ external knowledge search on their incremental innovation capability. Finally, the findings suggested that the relationship between a firm’s external knowledge search activities and its incremental innovation capability is stronger for high technological proximity coupled with high network centrality or poor structural holes in innovation networks.Originality/valueThis study adds value to open innovation literature by pointing out a positive relationship between external knowledge search and firm incremental innovation capability. Furthermore, this study reinforces the key joint contingent roles of technological proximity and network embeddedness. This study provides a valuable theoretical framework of incremental innovation capability determinants by connecting the different perspectives.

Open networks give actors non-redundant information that is diverse, while closed networks offer redundant information that is easier to interpret. Integrating arguments about network structure and the similarity of actors' knowledge, we propose two types of network configurations that combine diversity and ease of interpretation. Closed-diverse networks offer diversity in actors' knowledge domains and shared third-party ties to help in interpreting that knowledge. In open-specialized networks, structural holes offer diversity, while shared interpretive schema and overlap between received information and actors' prior knowledge help in interpreting new information without the help of third parties. In contrast, actors in open-diverse networks suffer from information overload due to the lack of shared schema or overlapping prior knowledge for the interpretation of diverse information, and actors in closed-specialized networks suffer from overembeddedness because they cannot access diverse information. Using CrunchBase data on early-stage venture capital investments in the U.S. information technology sector, we test the effect of investors' social capital on the success of their portfolio ventures. We find that ventures have the highest chances of success if their syndicating investors have either open-specialized or closed-diverse networks. These effects are manifested beyond the direct effects of ventures' or investors' quality and are robust to controlling for the possibility that certain investors could have chosen more promising ventures at the time of first funding.

Although much is known about how brokerage positions in social networks help individuals improve their own performance, we know little about the impact of brokers on those around them. Our study investigates brokerage as a public good. We focus on the positive and negative externalities of specific kinds of brokers: \"hubs,\" who act as the main interfaces between members of their own network community (\"network neighbors\") and members of other communities. Because hubs access diverse knowledge and perspectives, they create positive externalities by providing novel ideas to their network neighbors. But hubs also generate negative externalities: extensive cross-community activity puts heavy demands on their attention and time, so that hubs may not provide strong commitment to their neighbors’ projects. Because of this, network neighbors experience different externalities from hubs depending on their own formal role in projects. We use insights from our fieldwork in the French television game show industry to illustrate the mechanisms at play, and we test our theory with archival data on this industry from 1995 to 2012. Results suggest that the positive externalities of hubs help their neighbors contribute to the success of projects when these neighbors hold creativity-focused roles; yet the negative externalities of hubs hinder their neighbors’ contributions when they hold efficiency-focused roles.

Purpose Existing research has demonstrated that the innovation implications of structural holes are inconsistent. The diverse and broad resources associated with structural holes facilitate innovation. On the contrary, brokerage will also hinder trust and increase the opportunism behaviors among partners, which will damage innovation. Inspired by the conflicting conclusions, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the roles of structural holes on exploratory innovation and exploitative innovation. Design/methodology/approach To test the model, the paper used a panel of 305 US computer focal firms and 6,894 alliances from the period spanning 1993 to 2004, and adopted the Heckman two-stage selection procedure in predicting the results. Findings The results show that structural holes help firms to develop exploratory innovation while negatively impacting exploitative innovation. Originality/value This study offers precise insights on inconsistent understandings between structural holes and innovation by differentiating exploratory innovation from exploitative innovation. Furthermore, it contributes to the burgeoning literature on exploration and exploitation from the network perspective.

Although the positive effects of structural holes on creativity have been well explored, little research has explored why structural holes damage creativity. Based on social network theory and impression management theory, we propose that the influence of structural holes of knowledge hiders in trust networks vary by dimensions (i.e., evasive hiding, playing dumb, and rationalized hiding) of knowledge hiding, and structural holes have various indirect effects on creativity via knowledge hiding. Following a two-wave survey of 217 R&D employees, our results show that trust structural holes positively affect all the dimensions of knowledge hiding, and their effect on rationalized hiding is stronger than that on evasive hiding and playing dumb. Furthermore, we prove that evasive hiding has a positive mediating effect on the creativity of brokers, whereas playing dumb and rationalized hiding have adverse effects. Thus, trust structural holes have positive indirect effects on creativity via evasive hiding, while the indirect effects on creativity via playing dumb and rationalized hiding are negative. Moreover, we reveal that perspective taking mitigates the positive effect of structural holes on evasive hiding and playing dumb.

Little research to date has focused on a social network perspective in the field of knowledge hiding. Therefore, based on a three-wave examination of 222 Chinese employees, we integrated affective events theory and social network theory to investigate how individual network positions become cogent boundary conditions in the process of role stress influencing knowledge hiding through emotional exhaustion. Results revealed that role stress affected knowledge hiding through emotional exhaustion. We further posited that network centrality negatively moderated the effect of role stress on emotional exhaustion. Furthermore, structural holes positively moderated the effect of role stress on emotional exhaustion. Finally, network centrality and structural holes jointly moderated the indirect effect of role stress on knowledge hiding through emotional exhaustion, such that the indirect effect is stronger when low network centrality combined with high structural holes.

We adopt a sociopolitical perspective to examine how an employee’s political skill works in conjunction with social network structure to relate to the employee’s innovation involvement and job performance. We find that employee innovation involvement mediates the relationship between political skill and job performance and that the number of structural holes employees have in their social network strengthens the positive relationship between political skill and employee innovation involvement. Hypotheses were tested in a large microprocessor manufacturing firm using a sample of 113 employees responsible for generating technological innovations in support of the development of computer microchips. The results of a constructive replication study among medical professionals provide substantial support for our model. This study’s contribution is in showing that political skill both leads to innovation involvement and enables employees to take advantage of the innovation-enhancing potential of certain social network positions.

PurposeSupply chain fraud is a significant global concern for firms, consumers and governments. Evidence of major fraud events suggests the role of supply chain structures in enabling and facilitating fraud, as they often involve several parties in complicated networks designed to obfuscate the fraud. This paper identifies how the structural characteristics of supply chains can play an important role in enabling, facilitating and preventing fraud.Design/methodology/approachThe research follows a theory elaboration approach. The authors build on structural holes theory in conjunction with a multiple case study research design to identify new concepts and develop propositions regarding the role of network structure on supply chain fraud.FindingsThis research shows how structural holes in a supply chain can create advantages for unscrupulous firms, a role we call tertius fraudans, or the cheating third. This situation is exacerbated by structural ignorance, which refers to the lack of knowledge about structural connections in the network. Both structural holes and structural ignorance can create information gaps that facilitate fraud, and the authors propose solutions to detect and prevent this kind of fraud.Originality/valueThis paper extends structural holes theory into the domain of fraud. Novel concepts including tertius fraudans, structural ignorance and bridge collapse are offered, alongside a series of propositions that can help understand and manage structural supply chain fraud.