How to Become Central in an Informal Social Network: An Investigation of the Antecedents to Network Centrality in an Environmental SCM Initiative

How social interaction can prevent interpersonal conflict from inducing turnover intentions and diminishing championing behaviour

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to draw from conservation of resources theory to examine how employees’ experience of resource-draining interpersonal conflict might diminish the likelihood that they engage in championing behaviour. Its specific focus is on the mediating effect of their motivation to leave the organization and the moderating effect of their peer-oriented social interaction in this connection.

Design/methodology/approach

The research hypotheses are empirically assessed with quantitative survey data gathered from 632 employees who work in a large Mexican-based pharmacy chain. The statistical analyses involved an application of the Process macro, which enabled concurrent estimations of the direct, mediating and moderating effects predicted by the proposed conceptual framework.

Findings

Emotion-based tensions in co-worker relationships decrease employees’ propensity to mobilize support for innovative ideas, because employees make plans to abandon their jobs. This mediating role of turnover intentions is mitigated when employees maintain close social relationships with their co-workers.

Practical implications

For organizational practitioners, this study identifies a core explanation (i.e. employees want to quit the company) for why frustrations with emotion-based quarrels can lead to a reluctance to promote novel ideas – ideas that otherwise could add to organizational effectiveness. It also highlights how this harmful process can be avoided if employees maintain good, informal relationships with their colleagues.

Originality/value

For organizational scholars, this study explicates why and when employees’ experience of interpersonal conflict translates into complacent work behaviours, in the form of tarnished idea championing. It also identifies informal peer relationships as critical contingency factors that disrupt this negative dynamic.

Proactive champions: how personal and organizational resources enable proactive personalities to become idea champions

In investigating the relationship between employees' proactive personality and idea championing, this study addresses how this relationship might be augmented when employees can draw from pertinent personal resources (persuasion self-efficacy and job enthusiasm) and organizational resources (social interaction and organizational support for change). Two-wave survey data, collected among employees in a banking organization, show that employees' proactive personalities increase the likelihood that they mobilize support for innovative ideas, especially if they (1) feel confident that they can defend these ideas successfully, (2) experience their jobs as sources of personal fulfillment, (3) maintain informal relationships with peers, and (4) believe their organizations embrace change. For managers, these findings indicate that employees will leverage their positive energy, derived from their desire for initiative taking, into enhanced change-oriented championing activities if they also can draw from pertinent resources that enhance their ability or motivation to engage in those leveraging efforts.

Champions need an iron will: How employees use their dispositional self-control to overcome workplace incivility

This paper investigates how employees' experience of workplace incivility may steer them away from idea championing, with a special focus on the mediating role of their desire to quit their jobs and the moderating role of their dispositional self-control. Data collected from employees who work in a large retail organization reveal that an important reason that exposure to rude workplace behaviors reduces employees' propensity to champion innovative ideas is that they make concrete plans to leave. This mediating effect is mitigated when employees are equipped with high levels of self-control though. For organizations, this study accordingly pinpoints desires to seek alternative employment as a critical factor by which irritations about resource-draining incivility may escalate into a reluctance to add to organizational effectiveness through dedicated championing efforts. It also indicates how this escalation can be avoided, namely, by ensuring employees have access to pertinent personal resources.

Social network analysis in operations and supply chain management: a review and revised research agenda

Purpose

Social network analysis (SNA) seeks to manage the connections between entities through investigating and understanding behaviours and relationships. This study demonstrates the increasing relevance of social network approaches to solving contemporary and looming operations management (OM) and supply chain management (SCM) problems; including the coordination operations challenges raised by increased connectivity.

Design/methodology/approach

The systematic literature review approach adopted here examines 63 papers in OM and SCM published between 2000 and 2019. To-date OM reviews on SNA have focussed on discussing archetypal supply chains, what differentiates this study is the focus on how value was created in other forms of chains and operations.

Findings

This study reveals that current SNA adoption in OM is dominated by a manufacturing style focus on linear, sequential value creation, with a resulting focus only on sequential interdependence. SNA studies on reciprocally co-ordinated value creation (e.g. many service and network operations) are shown to have been neglected and are linked to a new agenda on contemporary management issues.

Research limitations/implications

Beyond encouraging the use of SNA, this study seeks to re-orient SNA approaches towards how contemporary services and networks create value.

Originality/value

Through adopting a unique combination of approaches and frameworks, this study challenges extant work to offer a substantially revised agenda for SNA use in Operations and Supply Chain Management.

Training and Diffusion of Change: The Impact of Training and Proactivity on Change-Related Advice Giving

This study investigates the effects of organizational change–related training on the diffusion of change through the employee advice network. It also examines the contribution of employee proactivity to the effects of that training. We compare trainees ( N = 46) and nontrained peers ( N = 47) doing similar work at pre- and posttest to examine how training and individual proactivity contribute to the change process. Results indicate that training is associated with increased change-related knowledge and skills and greater change-related advice giving (i.e., in-degree centrality). Additionally, proactivity is positively related to change-related advice giving and seeking (i.e., in- and out-degree centrality). Our findings also show that the effect of training on change-related advice giving is stronger for more proactive trainees than less proactive ones. We discuss our study’s theoretical and practical implications for both organizational change and employee proactivity.

The Effect of Network Structure on Performance in South Korea SMEs: The Moderating Effects of Absorptive Capacity

This study has analyzed how the network structure (density, centrality) affects the performance (convergence, overall) in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) with the different business exchange activities. In addition, we conducted a moderating effect of absorptive capacity (ability, motivation). Based on previous literature about the network and absorptive capacity, research hypotheses were developed and tested using a sample of 226 SMEs in South Korea. The results show that network density and centrality have a positive effect on perceived convergence and overall performance. These results are consistent with previous network studies relating to structural characteristics. To raise total performances in firms with different business exchange activities, they need to enhance density and centrality. For example, firms with different business exchange activities and high levels of density and centrality are able to easily obtain various types of information from other members of 7000 firms in Korea. Through this, they can improve performance. We also conducted the moderated regression analysis. The results show that employee ability has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between centrality and the overall performance while employee motivation has a negative moderating effect. The implications and directions for future study along with limitations are presented.

Conflict minerals traceability – a fuzzy set analysis

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate legal effects on social sustainability practices at buying firms. The US Dodd-Frank Act has forced listed companies to determine the degree to which their products contain conflict minerals (CM). The research question this study seeks to answer is the following: which factors influence a company’s ability to determine the provenance of its inputs?

Design/methodology/approach

The study examines secondary data in the form of CM reports of 50 US listed firms for two consecutive years using a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) approach.

Findings

This study identifies different configurations of stakeholder salience and firm resources that lead individual companies to achieve high levels of traceability. Findings show that firms’ CM governance mechanisms are a key determinant in the firms’ capacity to meet regulatory traceability requirements. Further, the authors find that both the presence and absence of specific stakeholder pressures and firm resources can lead to traceability. Findings also suggest that firms can achieve traceability without any pressure from stakeholders.

Research limitations/implications

The study investigates the practices of individual firms that are subject to the Dodd-Frank Act, rather than adopting a supply chain-wide perspective. Further, proxies had to be used to measure several constructs because of reliance on firms’ reporting, which implies that the study did not account for certain behavioral factors that influence traceability.

Practical implications

This study provides managers of both resource-rich and less resource-rich firms with possible pathways for achieving CM traceability.

Originality/value

The study contributes to the field of sustainability by providing exploratory insights into the antecedents of traceability and deriving theoretical propositions to guide further research. The authors apply fsQCA to investigate secondary data over multiple years, thus using a novel configurational methodology.

Social network analysis in supply chain management research

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate when and how to best use social network analysis (SNA) in the supply chain management (SCM) discipline. In doing so, the study identifies SCM phenomena that have been examined from a social network perspective (SNA approach) in the SCM literature and highlights additional SCM phenomena that would be worth investigating using social network research. Then, the study critically investigates the application of SNA as a methodology (SNA method), with the goal of assessing and mitigating methodological risks in future studies.

Design/methodology/approach

This study carries out a systematic literature review of articles published in 11 top-tier SCM journals over a 20-year period.

Findings

First, while social network research has gained momentum especially since 2010, scholars are not yet entirely aware of the many possibilities the SNA approach offers to the SCM field. Second, expanded possibilities also hold for the development of SNA as a method.

Originality/value

The paper guides future SCM research by investigating when SNA is the right approach to use and how SNA as a method should be performed. Theoretically richer and practically more relevant research should result.