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The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential influence of friendship on entrepreneurial teams (ETs) and on venture formation and development. The theoretical framework is built on the literature around friendship ties, the interaction of friendship ties and professional ties, and ETs.

Taking an interpretative methodological approach, the authors carried out qualitative interviews with ten business founders in Paris, France.

The authors identified different four profiles or types of ETs according to how friendship ties interact with professional ties among team members, which the authors designate as “fusion” and “separation”, and describe the orientation of this interaction, which the authors label as “affective” or “strategic”. These profiles affect the emergence of the idea and the choice of members in the formation of teams. They also shape the functioning of teams in terms of decision-making processes, recruitment and investment.

The findings underline the difficulties of studying friendship in ETs empirically and recommend longitudinal approaches for further research.

Findings offer insights in to why and how ETs based on friendship ties approach the pre-launch, launch and development phases of businesses as well as in to the interactions between professional and friendship ties, which is helpful to both practitioners and academics. The authors also discuss the consequences and implications of the different team types in terms of their risks and strategies for mitigating these risks.

This is one of the first empirical studies to examine how friendship and professional ties may combine and evolve in ETs, and their influence on the entrepreneurial process as it relates to venture formation and development.

The paper addresses the effect friendly and friendship relationships among members of innovation teams on the performance of the teams.

The members of innovation teams may develop friendly and friendship relationships over time. In our study, we focus on the effect of the frequency of such non‐work relationships on team performance. For this research, we collected full network data on non‐work relationships in a sample of 44 innovation teams and investigate how these “friendly and friendship networks” affect the performance of innovation teams.

As result turns out that the frequency of friendly ties has positive as well as negative consequences on team performance, whereas the frequency of friendship ties positively relates to the performance.

The results indicate the importance of informal relations for the performance of innovation teams. Further, it is shown that friendly and friendship relations have different theoretical and practical implications. Future research can overcome the limitations of the presented research by concentrating on larger sample sizes and longitudinal research designs.

Building on the results of the study managers can better orchestra innovation teams focussing not only on formal but also on informal contacts. The main practical implication is to strive for friendship contacts and to avoid too strong friendly contacts.

The study adds knowledge to the research on informal relationships and performance two‐fold. First, the findings testify that friendly and friendship contacts are different and not part of the same dimension, and there is strong evidence for the importance of informal contacts.

The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of multidimensional friendship networks on economic outcomes in the domain of online people-to-people (P2P) lending markets.

The empirical analysis is based on the data set of transactions and friendship networks from PPDai.com market, the most prominent P2P lending market in China. A friendship hierarchy is proposed in this paper to conceptualize friendship network types. Furthermore, methodologies of t-test, logistic regression and ordinary least squares regression are implemented to measure the impact of multidimensional friendship network variables on the probability of successful funding, as well as the interest rates on funded loans.

The study demonstrates significant effects of structural, relational and cognitive friendship networks using PPDai.com data. The results indicate that structural friendship network measured in terms of the number of friendship ties is a significant factor of funding performance. Additionally, borrowers, who are involved in higher-quality friendship networks, are more likely to be funded and pay lower interest rates on funded loans. Also, the deeper the level of the relationship is in the friendship hierarchy, the more significant will be the effect of friendship on the final economic results. Furthermore, quality is more important than quantity in determining funding performance.

This paper is the first to study the effects of multidimensional friendship networks on economic outcome variables in the domain of online P2P lending, thus broadening the theory of multidimensional social capital, which can deepen our understanding about how social networks work and have significant implications practically and theoretically.

Social network perspective to interorganizational relations focuses on the effect of organizations’ external relationships in collaboration as opposed to their internal resources and capabilities. It presumes that effectively managing such relationships is vital to gaining collaborative synergies. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the growing interest in the social network perspective to explain supply chain collaboration.

Literature from the network field is discussed in the context of interorganizational collaboration. A logistics service provider’s network is explored in depth leading to the inductive construction of a multi-level model of social network collaboration.

The conceptual model provides a useful lens to evaluate supply chain collaboration. The symbiotic relationship between interorganizational and interpersonal networks is highlighted as vital for effective collaboration.

The conceptual model has only been developed from a single network. Wider application is required to ensure generalizability. The critical role of the personal networks of boundary spanning actors at different levels wants further investigation.

Partners’ intra-organizational structures and personal ties of boundary spanners, both at the senior and operational level, have a profound effect on supply chain operations.

Personal networks interact with organizational networks and complement each other in yielding interfirm collaborative synergies.

Despite the growing popularity of internet based social media on e-commerce platforms, systematic examination of the emerging phenomenon is scarce. This paper aims to study whether online retailers ' social activity on e-commerce platforms improves their business performance, and if it does, what are the underlying mechanisms.

The paper proposes a typology of online retailers ' social activities on e-commerce platforms. Then drawing on social capital theory and social network theory, the authors develop hypotheses that relate online retailers ' social activities to their business performance. The hypotheses are tested using a large dataset collected from an e-commerce platform in China.

The paper shows that: online retailers ' social activities for friend-making improve their business performance, regardless of the directional attribute of the activities; social activities for advice-seeking decrease online retailers ' business performance; and social activities for advice-giving increase online retailers ' business performance.

The data in the empirical study are from an e-commerce platform in China, hence the research results may lack generalisability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed hypotheses further.

The paper includes implications for e-commerce market makers and online retailers operating on e-commerce platforms. The authors show that online retailers ' social activities on e-commerce platforms can be an important source of business value. However certain types of social activities may hurt online retailers ' business performance, implying the necessity of a thoughtful social activity strategy in online marketplaces.

This paper represents an early effort to study whether online retailers ' social activities on e-commerce platforms improve their business performance and the underlying mechanisms of the effect.

The purpose of this article is to empirically examine the relationship between managers' emotional exhaustion and the ethnic diversity, workload requirements, and friendship ties within their work-groups.

The research employs a full-network sample of all managers from an indigenously owned ethnically diverse IT firm located in the Caribbean island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. Using a social network design within a regression model, the relationship between managerial power and operational workload and the burnout dimension of emotional exhaustion is initially examined as a baseline model. Work-group ethnicity and friendship ties are then examined as moderators to this relationship. The authors then examine the role of work-group ethnicity and friendship ties as a buffer mechanism using an efficient frontier analysis where managers act as decision-making units.

The study indicates that ethnic diversity acts more as a “negative moderator” to emotional exhaustion, while friendship ties act as both a “positive moderator” and “buffer” to work-related emotional exhaustion.

This is one of the few empirical studies that has examined the issues of ethnic diversity and burnout using social network and efficient frontier methodologies. This is also one of the first empirical studies to investigate these issues using an in-depth, full-sample case study of actual, real-work network relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to understand better the gendered nature of role model status within organizations. The paper aims to argue that women require organizational legitimacy to be perceived as a role model, whereas men rely primarily on the strength of social ties within their friendship networks.

An empirical study of admissions department employees at a large eastern university within the USA was conducted. Using a social network approach, participants were asked to identify advice, friendship and role model relationships and provide information about awards and recognition received from the organization.

The results showed that, in order to be perceived as a role model, females needed to give (but not ask for) advice, earn organizational rewards, hold leadership positions in the organization, and maintain strong ties with other employees. Males only had to have a number of friendship or advice ties to be seen as a role model.

The findings are consistent with the idea that females need to establish formal organizational status or legitimacy (e.g. leadership roles, rewards) in order to be perceived as a role model. In addition, balancing advice‐giving versus advice‐seeking is more important for female compared with male role models.

This paper examines the concept of role modeling using a social network analysis, thus providing new insight about the impact of advice and friendship network centrality on role model status in organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to study whether the use of a shared study space played a role in shaping graduate students’ social networks by exploring how the copresence in space was related to the structure of friendship and advice networks. The authors first proposed two concepts of spatial copresence: measured spatial-temporal copresence and perceived copresence. The authors then examined the role of copresence through a case study of a shared study space occupied by 27 graduate students in the same department.

Copresence relations were first constructed through a six-month room access history data set and self-reported data to examine whether measured spatial-temporal copresence was consistent with perceived copresence. Friendship and advice network relations were then analyzed with copresence, social media connections, class project collaboration relations and social homophily (nationality, gender, cohort) through quadratic assignment procedure (QAP) and MQAP analysis.

The authors found that students who used the shared study space more often reported more friendship and advice ties. The perceived copresence and the measured spatial-temporal copresence were highly correlated. Copresence relations, as measured by survey and room access history, were both significantly correlated with advice relation, which was associated with perceived social support.

This study contributes to the debate about whether “space” continues to play significant roles in graduate students’ social networks in the context of flexible learning environments. The results also reveal new directions for research methods in studying spatial proximity in flexible settings.

The paper aims to provide a theoretically informed critique of current measurement practices for word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) campaigns.

An exploratory field study is conducted on a real-life WOMM campaign. Data are collected from two generations of campaign participants using a custom-built Facebook app and subjected to social network analysis (SNA). We compare our theoretically informed measure of campaign reach with industry standard practice.

Standard metrics for WOMM campaigns assume campaign reach equates to the number of campaign-related conversations. These metrics fail to allow for the possibility that some participants may be exposed multiple times to campaign-related messaging. In this exploratory field study, standard metrics overestimate campaign reach by 57.5 per cent. The campaign is also significantly less efficient in terms of cost-per-conversation. SNA shows that multiple exposures are associated with transitivity and tie strength. Multiple exposures mean that the total number of campaign-related conversations cannot be regarded as equivalent to the number of individuals reached.

SNA provides a sound theoretical foundation for the critique of current WOMM measurement practices. Two social-structural network attributes – transitivity and tie strength – inform our critique. A single WOMM campaign provides the field study context.

The findings have significant implications for the development and deployment of WOMM effectiveness and efficiency metrics and are relevant to WOMM agencies, agency clients and the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association.

This is the largest field study of its kind having collected data on >5,000 WOMM campaign-related conversations. Participants specified precisely whom they spoke to about the campaign and the strength of that social tie. This is the first SNA-informed critique of standard WOMM campaign measurement practices and first quantification of offline multiple exposures to a WOMM campaign. We demonstrate how standard campaign metrics are based on the false assumption that word-of-mouth flows exclusively along intransitive ties.

This study aims to examine how embeddedness influences consultants' information seeking when making decisions within a social network of relationships, and how these social networks evolve throughout the project delivery stages. The study is grounded in social network theory and examines embeddedness from three perspectives: structural (network cohesion), relational (tie strength in terms of friendship and knowledge awareness) and actor prominence.

A social network analysis (SNA) questionnaire was administered to a team of consultants working on a management consultancy project in Shanghai, China. The SNA measures of density, degree centrality and betweenness centrality were used to analyse relationship patterns among project team members, permitting comparison between the networks. Networks were also compared across the three project delivery stages of collect, consider and create.

Structural embeddedness was observed in the active information seeking behaviour among consultancy team members. The moderate network density of the self-organising information seeking networks across the project delivery stages ensures that the team remains connected but avoids information redundancy and overload. Relational embeddedness was evident through the multiplexity of ties among team members with overlapping friendship and information seeking relationships. The knowledge awareness network's sparseness indicates a team of autonomous knowledge workers with distributed expertise. Project managers were the most prominent actors across the three project delivery stages, underlining these actors' relational leadership role.

The study provides a deeper understanding of collaborative decision-making behaviours in dynamic-project environments. Limited attempts have been made to visualise and analyse the relationships involved in small consulting teams. The novelty of the network approach adopted stems from its ability to offer a structural view of the relationship among consultants, thus offering a distinctive and arguably more complete picture of consultancy team dynamics.

The study validates the social network theory of embeddedness in a real-world collaborative decision-making setting and provides a deeper understanding of information seeking behaviours for decision-making in dynamic-project environments. From a project management process viewpoint, the evolving nature of the information seeking network as it changes across the project stages with associated actors' roles was also visualised graphically, offering a distinctive and arguably more complete picture of consultancy team dynamics.