The Contaminating Effects of Building Instrumental Ties
By Tiziana Casciaro, Francesca Gino, Maryam Kouchaki. 2014
197 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In this paper, we examine the consequences of social networking for an individual’s morality, arguing that the content and approach of networking have different implications for how a person feels during the development and maintenance of social ties. We focus in particular on professional-instrumental networking: the purposeful creation of social ties in support of task and professional goals. Unlike personal networking in pursuit of emotional support or friendship, and unlike social ties that emerge spontaneously, instrumental networking in pursuit of professional goals can impinge on an individual’s moral purity—a psychological state that results from viewing the self as clean from a moral standpoint—and thus make an individual feel dirty. We theorize that such feelings of dirtiness decrease the frequency of instrumental networking and, as a result, work performance. We conducted four studies using both field and laboratory data from different populations to investigate the psychological consequences of networking behaviors. Two experiments provide support for a causal relationship between instrumental networking for professional goals, feeling dirty, and need for cleansing. A survey study of lawyers in a large North American business law firm offers correlational evidence that professionals who experience feelings of dirtiness from instrumental networking, relative to those who do not, tend to engage in it less frequently and have lower job performance. With regard to sources of variability in dirtiness from instrumental networking for professional goals, we document that when those who engage in such networking have high versus low power, they experience fewer feelings of dirtiness. An additional experimental study constructively replicates this finding.
Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/76b815de47222a5860bddd664922fb586ecdc573
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In Information Systems and Management
In Safety Research
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Systems Perspective of Amazon Mechanical Turk for Organizational Research: Review and Recommendations (2017, background): “…literature of non-experimental (e.g., Cho and Allen, 2012; Wiltermuth and Flynn, 2013; Long and Christian, 2015), experimental (e.g., Chua, 2013; Casciaro et al., 2014; Huang et al., 2015a; Inesi and Cable, 2015; Welsh et al., 2015), and time-separated designs (e.g., Wiltermuth et al., 2013;…”
- Planned Luck: How Incubators Can Facilitate Serendipity for Nascent Entrepreneurs Through Fostering Network Embeddedness (2020, background): “, Kilduff & Tsai, 2003), it has typically been seen as an exogenous structural feature of spontaneous encounters (Casciaro et al., 2014; Feld, 1981; Shipilov et al., 2014), or even “error” or “uncertainty” that needs to be reduced, rather than as something that can be beneficially managed, for insta”