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Most network research in organizations assumes away the dissociative forces instantiated in negative ties, instead pursuing ties that reflect only associative forces, to the detriment of understanding organizational networks. This essay provides a brief history of negative tie research in organizations; discusses different definitions of negative ties, situating them within the tripartite model of interpersonal attitudes; suggests alternative paths to network dynamics when considering negative ties; covers existing and suggested paths to studying personality antecedents of negative ties; and briefly reviews the research on the consequences of negative ties in organizations and suggestions for future work.

The purpose of this study is to determine the effect of two types of negative ties, namely perceived negative ties and intended negative ties, on the two types of employee work outcomes, namely job performance and ethical voice. In addition, the chapter discusses the role of personal reputation as a mediator in explaining the relationship between negative ties and work outcomes. The study sample comprised of 103 blue-collar workers and their direct supervisors in a large cement factory in southern Iraq. The study used survey method as a mean to collect the data. Data analysis showed that perceived negative ties and intended negative ties influence participants’ job performance and ethical voice. The result also indicates that personal reputation mediates the relationship between negative ties and work outcomes. In light of the results, theoretical and practical implications are presented.

This paper aims to investigate whether the interactional effects of recommendation valence, tie strength and service type produce different effects on attitude and buying intention in a social networking context.

A 2 × 3 × 3 between-subject experiment was carried out, involving 616 participants, and MANOVA was used to test hypotheses.

The interactions of valence by tie strength and valence by service type affect attitude, but not intention. The review valence × tie strength × service type interaction influences both attitude and intention, and its effect on intention is fully mediated by attitude.

Negative recommendations for credence and experiential services communicated by individuals with no-tie relationships have a strong negative effect on attitude. However, positive recommendations from strong and weak ties for search and experience services are more influential than recommendations from no ties for credence services.

The results are explained by using cue sufficiency theory, which suggests that a single extreme cue serves as a defining feature.

The purpose of this paper is to adapt the job demands–resources perspective to extend social network literature by examining the effectiveness of psychological (work engagement and emotional exhaustion) and instrumental (access to benefits) mechanisms as mediators of the relationship between employees’ centrality in positive and negative ties networks and job performance.

The survey data were collected from 103 employees working at a public bank in three stages.

The study results supported the hypotheses that an individual’s centrality in a negative network increases his/her experience of emotional exhaustion, while individual centrality in a positive network increases his/her work engagement. In addition, the findings showed that centrality in positive networks will be more predictive of work engagement when negative ties centrality increases, and the relationship between centrality in the negative network and emotional exhaustion is weaker when centrality in the positive network is higher.

The study extends out to the social ledger model (Labianca and Brass, 2006) by examining the dual pathways of effects of positive and negative ties in predicting employee outcomes. In addition, the authors’ model enriches the understanding of the nature of social network ties more broadly by suggesting that its effects in the workplace can extend beyond psychological effects to include instrumental impact.

Managers seeking to manage customer word-of-mouth (WOM) behavior need to understand how different attitudinal drivers (e.g. satisfaction, positive and negative emotion, commitment, and self-brand connection) relate to a range of WOM behaviors. They also need to know how the effects of these drivers are moderated by customer characteristics (e.g. gender, age, income, country). The paper aims to discuss these issues.

To investigate these issues a built a large-scale multi-national database was created that includes attitudinal drivers, customer characteristics, and a full range of WOM behaviors, involving both the sending and receiving of both positive and negative WOM, with both strong and weak ties. The combination of sending-receiving, positive-negative and strong ties-weak ties results in a typology of eight distinct WOM behaviors. The investigation explores the drivers of those behaviors, and their moderators, using a hierarchical Bayes model in which all WOM behaviors are simultaneously modeled.

Among the many important findings uncovered are: the most effective way to drive all positive WOM behaviors is through maximizing affective commitment and positive emotions; minimizing negative emotions and ensuring that customers are satisfied lowers all negative WOM behaviors; all other attitudinal drivers have lower or even mixed effects on the different WOM behaviors; and customer characteristics can have a surprisingly large impact on how attitudes affect different WOM behaviors.

These findings have important managerial implications for promotion (which attitudes should be stimulated to produce the desired WOM behavior) and segmentation (how should marketing efforts change, based on segments defined by customer characteristics).

This research points to the myriad of factors that enhance positive and reduce negative word-of-mouth, and the importance of accounting for customer heterogeneity in assessing the likely impact of attitudinal drivers on word-of-mouth behaviors.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the consequences of jobseeker decision-making style on information search behaviour, information evaluation and perceptions of organisational attractiveness (OA). In this study, the authors assess whether, when presented with a realistic job information searching scenario of receiving basic job information from a typical formal short job advertisement, maximisers and satisficers differ on need for further information and evaluation of further information from informal information sources in relation to valence and tie strength.

A scenario-based experiment was conducted on 280 participants from the USA, with work experience in retail, using Amazon Mechanical Turk.

The results show that, compared to satisficers, significantly more maximisers chose to search for further information about the company/vacancy after receiving a typical short advertisement message. Furthermore, the results highlight the moderating effects of decision-making style (maximiser vs satisficer), tie strength (strong-tie vs weak-tie provider) and message valence (positive vs negative) on jobseekers’ perceived OA.

Companies seeking to increase their candidate pool should consider accommodating the different decision-making styles of jobseekers by carefully designing the content of recruitment information and utilising recruitment information sources. Although conducted in just one sector, the ubiquity of the maximiser/satisficer decision-making style implies further research to assess the implications for other sectors.

Research on decision-making style in recruitment is relatively limited. This study demonstrates the differences between maximisers and satisficers in terms of job-related information needs, and the evaluation of the source/content, when searching for a retail trade job.

Purpose – This chapter addresses the nature, formalization, and neural bases of (affective) social ties and discusses the relevance of ties for health economics. A social tie is defined as an affective weight attached by an individual to the well-being of another individual (‘utility interdependence’). Ties can be positive or negative, and symmetric or asymmetric between individuals. Characteristic of a social tie, as conceived of here, is that it develops over time under the influence of interaction, in contrast with a trait like altruism. Moreover, a tie is not related to strategic behavior such as reputation formation but seen as generated by affective responses.

Methodology/approach – A formalization is presented together with some supportive evidence from behavioral experiments. This is followed by a discussion of related psychological constructs and the presentation of suggestive existing neural findings. To help prepare the grounds for a model-based neural analysis some speculations on the neural networks involved are provided, together with suggestions for future research.

Findings – Social ties are not only found to be important from an economic viewpoint, it is also shown that they can be modeled and related to neural substrates.

Originality/value of the chapter – By providing an overview of the economic research on social ties and connecting it with the broader behavioral and neuroeconomics literature, the chapter may contribute to the development of a neuroeconomics of social ties.

Digitalization encourages the manufacturer to engage in inter-organizational technological activities (i.e. supplier IT integration and supply visibility) with its major supplier, which influences supply chain (SC) governance. This study tests a moderated mediation model that considers supplier IT integration and supply visibility as mediators between supply-side digitalization and supplier opportunism, and relational ties as a moderator in the relationship between inter-organizational technological activities and supplier opportunism.

Ordinary least square (OLS) regression is used to examine data from 200 firms in China describing their supply chain management (SCM) practices and perceived relationships with their major suppliers.

Supply-side digitalization is positively related to supplier IT integration and supply visibility. Supply-side digitalization has a positive indirect effect on supplier opportunism through supplier IT integration but a negative indirect effect through supply visibility. Relational ties weaken the positive effect of supplier IT integration and the positive indirect effect of supply-side digitalization on supplier opportunism. Relational ties also weaken the negative effect of supply visibility and the negative indirect effect of supply-side digitalization on supplier opportunism.

This study enriches understanding of SC governance in the digital age by empirically confirming that digital transformation brings both challenges and opportunities to SC governance and by clarifying the interplay of relational governance and technological activities. In addition, this study contributes to the SC digitalization literature by empirically validating the role of digitalization in promoting inter-organizational technological activities, as well as by revealing its potential dark side.

The research community currently employs four very different versions of the social network concept: A social network is seen as a set of socially constructed role relations (e.g., friends, business partners), a set of interpersonal sentiments (e.g., liking, trust), a pattern of behavioral social interaction (e.g., conversations, citations), or an opportunity structure for exchange. Researchers conventionally assume these conceptualizations are interchangeable as social ties, and some employ composite measures that aim to capture more than one dimension. Even so, important discrepancies often appear for non-ties (as dyads where a specific role relation or sentiment is not reported, a specific form of interaction is not observed, or exchange is not possible).

Investigating the interplay across the four definitions is a step toward developing scope conditions for generalization and application of theory across these domains.

This step is timely because emerging tools of computational social science – wearable sensors, logs of telecommunication, online exchange, or other interaction – now allow us to observe the fine-grained dynamics of interaction over time. Combined with cutting-edge methods for analysis, these lenses allow us to move beyond reified notions of social ties (and non-ties) and instead directly observe and analyze the dynamic and structural interdependencies of social interaction behavior.

This unprecedented opportunity invites us to refashion dynamic structural theories of exchange that advance “beyond networks” to unify previously disjoint research streams on relationships, interaction, and opportunity structures.