Integrating Personality and Social Networks: A Meta-Analysis of Personality, Network Position, and Work Outcomes in Organizations

By Ruolian Fang, Blaine Landis, Zhen Zhang, Marc H. Anderson, Jason D. Shaw, Martin Kilduff. Organ. Sci., 2015

364 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using data from 138 independent samples, we meta-analytically examined three research questions concerning the roles of personality and network position in organizations. First, how do different personality characteristics-self-monitoring and the Big Five personality traits-relate to indegree centrality and brokerage, the two most studied structurally advantageous positions in organizational networks? Second, how do indegree centrality and brokerage compare in explaining job performance and career success? Third, how do these personality variables and network positions relate to work outcomes? Our results show that self-monitoring predicted indegree centrality across expressive and instrumental networks and brokerage in expressive networks after controlling for the Big Five traits. Self-monitoring, therefore, was especially relevant for understanding why people differ in their acquisition of advantageous positions in social networks. But the total variance explained by personality ranged between 3% and 5%. Surprisingly, we found that indegree centrality was more strongly related to job performance and career success than brokerage. We also found that personality predicted job performance and career success above and beyond network position and that network position partially mediated the effects of certain personality variables on work outcomes. This paper provides an integrated view of how an individual's personality and network position combine to influence job performance and career success.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2c186f159d2618a1d3573297a8781ca2c3a63ab8

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Citations in the corpus

The Acquisitive Nature of Extraverted CEOs (2017, background): “A recent meta-analysis by Fang et al. (2015) indicated that while more-extraverted people may not take a more-central place than others in expressive networks of friendships, they do so in instrumental networks that have a job- or firm-related purpose.”
Networks, Technology, and Entrepreneurship: A Field Quasi-experiment among Women in Rural India (2017, neutral): “In India, informal networks in the community provide information and opportunities e.g., building influence, social credentials and garnering identity and recognition (Fang et al., 2015; Lin, 1999).”
Office Chit-Chat as a Social Ritual: The Uplifting Yet Distracting Effects of Daily Small Talk at Work (2020, positive): “Our research extends the growing literature integrating workplace interactions and individual differences (e.g., Fang et al., 2015; Mehra, Kilduff, & Brass, 2001).”
Social Networks and Cognition (2020, background): “For example,self-monitoring is a powerful predictor of individuals’ career success, partly because individuals who are high self-monitors tend to end up in desirable positions in social networks (Fang et al. 2015).”
How leader role identity influences the process of leader emergence: A social network analysis (2018, background): “Individuals who are higher in indegree centrality have broader exposure to information and social support (Fang et al., 2015) and may be more likely to be the target of organizational citizenship behaviours and less likely to be the target of counterproductive work behaviours from others in their ne”