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The field of Human Resource Management (HRM) has long recognized the importance of interpersonal influence for employee and organizational effectiveness. HRM research and practice have focused primarily on individuals’ characteristics and behaviors as a means to understand “who” is influential in organizations, with substantially less attention paid to social networks. To reinvigorate a focus on network structures to explain interpersonal influence, the authors present a comprehensive account of how network structures enable and constrain influence within organizations. The authors begin by describing how power and status, two key determinants of individual influence in organizations, operate through different mechanisms, and delineate a range of network positions that yield power, reflect status, and/or capture realized influence. Then, the authors extend initial structural views of influence beyond the positions of individuals to consider how network structures within and between groups – capturing group social capital and/or shared leadership – enable and constrain groups’ ability to influence group members, other groups, and the broader organizational system. The authors also discuss how HRM may leverage these insights to facilitate interpersonal influence in ways that support individual, group, and organizational effectiveness.

People centrally located within networks enjoy a variety of benefits. Why some people achieve such advantage while others do not is not well understood. Using a novel dataset that maps the workflow network among software engineers at a Fortune 500 technology company, I trace the evolution of the position of 804 new entrants to the firm over a period of three years. Findings paint a consistent picture as to the determinants of position in this network: one’s team and one’s job at time of entry, rather than intellectual or social endowment, play the strongest roles in determining one’s subsequent centrality and autonomy.

What is the scope of brokerage network to be considered in thinking strategically? Given the value of bridging structural holes, is there value to being affiliated with people or organizations that bridge structural holes? The answer is “no” according to performance associations with manager networks, which raises a question about the consistency of network theory across micro to macro levels of analysis. The purpose here is to align manager evidence with corresponding macro evidence on the supplier and customer networks around four-digit manufacturing industries in the 1987 and 1992 benchmark input–output tables. In contrast to the manager evidence, about 24% of the industry-structure effect on industry performance can be attributed to structure beyond the industry's own buying and selling, to networks around the industry's suppliers and customers. However, the industry evidence is not qualitatively distinct from the manager evidence so much as it describes a more extreme business environment.

Purpose – This study explores subsidiaries' local network embeddedness and how it contributes to localised subsidiary innovation output from a social network perspective. In particular, we are interested in analysing the consequences of local network density, diversity and, subsidiaries' network position on its innovation outcomes.

Design/methodology/approach – Data are derived from a longitudinal quantitative study of the entire R&D network within one of the largest life science cluster in Germany, the ‘BioRegion Rhein-Neckar-Dreieck’.

Findings – Our findings indicate that the size (density) of the local network has an inverted U-shaped effect on the innovation outcomes of MNC subsidiaries. Our findings further indicate that a strong brokerage position in the local network has a significant positive influence on the innovation output while a position in the core of the network has a significant negative effect on the innovation output.

Research implications – Our results shed new light on the relationship between local embeddedness, brokerage, the danger of overembeddedness and innovation output of MNC subsidiaries.

We propose an information-based view of the dynamics of network positions and use it to explain why bridging positions become stronger. We depart from previous network dynamics studies that implicitly assume that firms have homogenous information about the network structure. Using network experiments with both students and managers, we vary a firm's network horizon (i.e., how much information a firm has about the network structure) and the network horizon heterogeneity (i.e., how this information is distributed among the firms within the network). Our results indicate that firms with a higher network horizon occupy a stronger bridging position, especially under conditions of high network horizon heterogeneity. At a more general level, these results provide an indirect validation of what so far has been an untested assumption in interfirm network research, namely that firms are aware of their position in the overall network and consciously attempt to improve their position.

Interpersonal and informal ties and networks, known as wasta in the Arab Middle East region, remain a major force in Middle Eastern societies, determining most economic, social and political outcomes. Yet the literature on informal ties and networks is largely characterized by a lack of contributions from the Arab world, despite the adverse effect that lack of understanding of the wasta phenomenon is having on the effectiveness of expatriate managers and subsequently on business performance. This chapter therefore aims to shed light on the meaning, characteristics, structure, and role of wasta in establishing and maintaining successful business relationships. It ends with recommendations for foreign investors and international managers who wish to establish and maintain successful business relationships in the Middle East on how to capitalize on interpersonal networks within this process.

Although a large contingency of theory and research has been conducted in the area of individual and interpersonal communication, relatively few theoreticians have focused on the broader character of communication at the organizational level of analysis. With the increasing emphases on total quality, leadership, adaptive cultures, process reengineering, and other organizational change and development efforts, however, the need to understand the process and function of organizational communication at a broader, more systemic level is paramount. The following paper attempts to address this issue by providing: (1) a comparative review and critique of three “classic” theoretical approaches to describing the importance of communication in organizations and the relationship between communication and organizational functioning (open systems theory, the information‐processing perspective, and the communication as culture framework); and (2) a new integrative framework—the CPR model of organizational communication—for conceptualizing and understanding the nature of communication in organizations based on constructs adapted from these three perspectives. The model is then used both in an applied example to help diagnose an organizational system and to stimulate suggestions for future research.

This paper explores the origin of entrepreneurial orientations (EO) from an organizational embeddedness perspective. It examines the impacts of firms’ network embeddedness such as structural, positional and relational on three dimensions of EO, namely, risk-taking, proactiveness and innovativeness. After a brief review of the EO construct and social network theory, we derive a set of testable propositions that relate embeddedness properties such as centrality, structural holes, direct/indirect ties, and network density, to the magnitude of three key EO dimensions. We argue that each dimension may vary independently with each other and has its own formation mechanism, which entails rich implications for entrepreneurial network research.

Extending the proposition that boards of directors influence firms’ mergers and acquisitions (M&As), studies have investigated how board interlocks – network ties formed by directors — may shape M&A processes and outcomes. While board interlocks and M&As are two streams of research, each underpinned by voluminous studies, their cross-fertilization has been relatively limited. In this chapter, the authors take stock of prior research investigating the relationship between board interlocks and M&As. Specifically, emphasizing the network features of board interlocks, the authors highlight a connection aspect and a structure aspect of board interlocks in appreciating their effects during pre-acquisition and post-acquisition phases. Based on this framework, the authors then lay out a research agenda that can further bridge board interlocks with M&As. Overall, this chapter endeavors to integrate and expand our knowledge on the acquisition implications of board interlocks.