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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.

The purpose of this paper is to look at immigrant family business through the framework of social capital by investigating how the social capital of immigrant family business owners helps them obtain network benefits and improve business performance.

This paper presents an empirical investigation of 170 immigrant family business owners. The authors examine social capital as a multidimensional construct and focus on two attributes of social capital: structural embeddedness and relational embeddedness. In addition, this study examines how social capital influences business performance through the mediating effect of network benefits. Finally, the constructs of family capital and immigrant community capacity are also investigated.

The results suggest that the two attributes of social capital differed in their effects on network benefits, and that network benefits mediated the influence of social capital attributes on family business performance. Specifically, relational social capital influenced access to resources and information, and structural social capital influenced access to resources. Family ties affected network benefits and business performance, and immigrant community capacity had the predicted moderating effect on the relationship between immigrant community ties and network benefits.

This investigation has the potential to advance understanding of immigrant family businesses by assessing how the overall social capital of the family business owner influences business performance. The study also furthers the understanding of family capital and immigrant community capacity. In addition, these results serve practitioners by helping identify avenues to increase immigrant family business performance, an issue that is increasingly important today given the contribution of such businesses to the economic vitality of societies.

This chapter presents systematic evidence on the persistent power of guanxi, the Chinese phrase for informal social relations and networks, in transitional China. I draw heavily on my previous publications reporting findings from a series of probability sample surveys of the Job-Search Network (thereafter JSNET) project in Chinese cities, and job histories of the survey respondents combined cover a span of 37 years from 1978, the beginning year of China's market-oriented reforms, to 2014, the year of last JSNET survey completed.

This study aims to examine the underlying mechanism of buyer–seller ties and salespeople’s performance. Also examined was the moderating effects of the density of the customer network in which the salesperson is embedded.

The study developed a framework incorporating five key variables: strength of ties, network benefits, network density, sales effectiveness and sales revenue. The framework was tested using data from insurance companies in China.

Process regression and stepwise regression results indicated that information, influence and solidarity benefit will mediate the effects of strength of ties on sales effectiveness both when taken as a set and separately. Information, influence and solidarity benefit will mediate the effects of strength of ties on sales revenue when taken as a set, but only influence will mediate the effect separately. In addition, the positive relationship between strength of ties and solidarity benefit is weaker when network density is high.

Sales managers should initiate trainings and workshops about how to obtain high-quality information from customers, improving influencing power and establishing solidarity with customers. Moreover, salespeople should avoid conducting business with a group of customers if they are densely connected to one another.

On the one hand, this study contributes to the underlying mechanism research on buyer–seller ties and sales performance. On the other hand, it contributes to the contingency research on sales performance and the development of social network theory.

This paper aims to examine the role of Facebook friends on the intention to join brand pages in this social network site (SNS). SNSs have grown in both popularity and use. They allow individuals to articulate their social networks by developing a list of other members on the site with whom they share a connection. These platforms also allow companies to create profiles to promote their brands. However, many firms have jumped into SNSs by creating a “brand page” without fully understanding how to spread it successfully.

Two experiments were developed. In the first one, the authors manipulated how the individual comes to know about brand pages. Participants discovered a brand page through a friend with whom they have either a strong tie or a weak tie. In the second experiment (2 × 2), the authors manipulated tie strength (strong vs weak) and the type of recommendation (active vs passive).

Results of the first study show that as the individual has more experience in Facebook (measured in this paper through satisfaction, past behavior of following brands and Facebook intensity), the effect of tie strength on the intention to join a brand page dilutes. The second study confirms Study 1 and shows that strong ties exert more influence than weak ties when the brand page is actively recommended by Facebook friends.

This paper shows that the influence of strong ties is particularly important for individuals with low levels of experience in Facebook. As experience in SNSs is expected to continue growing, managers should not forget the role of weak ties as a source of information for their networked friends. Strong ties only remain more influential than weak ties when the information about the brand page is received through an invitation.

This paper explores the interpersonal influences in Facebook, asserting that the influence of tie strength depends on the level of experience in the SNS, and on the way, information about the brand page is received.

Social recommendation has been recognized as a kind of e-commerce with large potential, but how social recommendations influence consumer decisions is still unclear. This paper aims to investigate how recommendations from different social ties influence consumers’ purchase intentions through both behavior and brain activity.

Utilizing behavioral (N = 70) and electroencephalogram (EEG) (N = 49) experiments, this study explored participants’ behavior and brain responses after being recommended by different social ties. The data were analyzed using statistical inference and event-related potential (ERP) analysis.

Behavioral results show that social tie strength positively impacts purchase intention, which can be fitted by a logarithmic model. Moreover, recommender-to-customer similarity and product affect mediate the effect of tie strength on purchase intention serially. EEG findings show that recommendations from weak tie strength elicit larger N100, N200 and P300 amplitudes than those from strong tie strength. These results imply that weak tie strength may motivate individuals to recruit more mental resources in social recommendation, including unconscious processing of consumer attention and conscious processing of cognitive conflict and negative emotion.

This study considers the effects of continuous social ties on purchase intention and models them mathematically, exploring the intrinsic mechanisms by which strong and weak ties influence purchase intentions through recommender-to-customer similarity and product affect, contributing to the applications of the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) model in the field of social recommendation. Furthermore, our study adopting EEG techniques bridges the gap of relying solely on self-report by providing an avenue to obtain relatively objective findings about the consumers’ early-occurred (unconscious) attentional responses and late-occurred (conscious) cognitive and emotional responses in purchase decisions.

Organizational research has suggested that network ties influence adoption of innovations and other organizational behavior. This paper aims to study the impact of network ties on change in police agency practices in a sample of city and county police agencies for which Weiss provided data on informal communication ties between agency planners.

The authors analyzed change in six agency practices from 1997 to 2000, as indicated in law enforcement management and administrative statistics (LEMAS) data, with a variable indicating whether an agency's network contact engaged in the practice.

Network ties appeared to influence change in computer use for crime mapping, with change more likely when the agency and its network contact initially differed with respect to the practice. Statistically significant network influences were not found for change in the other practices (existence of a formal community policing plan, geographic assignment of detectives, encouragement of scanning, analysis, response, and assessment (SARA) problem‐solving, computer use for resource allocation, and patrol access to criminal histories).

Results suggest that network ties may affect change in policing practices and innovation, but that this does not necessarily hold across all types of practices.

With at least some evidence of network influences, results suggest that policymakers should attempt to take advantage of network structure when encouraging beneficial changes in agency practices.

This paper studies the impact of network ties on change in police agency practices in a sample of city and county police agencies.

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.

This study aims to explore the influence of the strength of ties (strong ties and weak ties) on contractual flexibility (term flexibility and process flexibility) and relationship quality among stakeholders in a megaproject network.

This study, via a questionnaire survey, collected 380 valid responses from megaproject professionals (including project managers, department managers and project engineers). The data were analyzed using least squares structural equation modeling.

The results show that both strong ties and weak ties have positive effects on relationship quality. The introduction of contractual flexibility can help improve relationship quality by combining the positive effects of the strength of ties. Interestingly, the indirect influence of strong ties on relationship quality is mainly due to term flexibility. However, the influence of process flexibility is not significant, while weak ties have an indirect influence through term flexibility and process flexibility.

This study, while helpful to megaproject management both in theory and practice, is nevertheless subject to several limitations. First, this study only considers the impact of the strength of ties on contractual flexibility and relationship quality; other factors, such as environmental uncertainty, are not explored. Second, the sample data are limited to just a few regions of China. Future research should cover other influencing factors, in order to make the model more substantial; data should also be collected from different cultural and industrial sources, thereby extending and further verifying the results.

This study makes three contributions to extant megaproject literature. First, this study provides a deep and nuanced understanding of the strength of ties. With the distinction between strong ties and weak ties clearly explained, this research furnishes a subtler understanding of relationship governance than has previously been achieved. Second, by precisely identifying the mechanism of how contract flexibility improves contract control and coordination functions, this research offers a complementary view of how contractual flexibility positively contributes to cooperation and relationship quality. Third, this study identifies which dimension of the strength of ties is more influential. This brings a new explanation for the previous controversy and offers some insight into the determinants of how to improve relationship quality in Chinese megaprojects.

The study aims to determine the resource access mechanism in inter-firm networks that aids SME survival in Ghana.

The authors collect census data on a poultry cluster in Ghana and construct a directed network. The network is used to extract direct and indirect ties both incoming and outgoing, as well as estimate the structural holes of the actors. These variables are used to estimate for survival of SMEs after a one-year period using a binary logit model.

The study finds that out-indirect ties and structural hole have a significant influence on SME survival. This works through the global influence and the vision advantage that these positions and ties offer the SMEs.

The study offers SMEs a choice of whom to collaborate with for information (resources) in the form of outgoing and incoming ties at both the global and local level.