The role of sociopolitical workplace networks in involuntary employee turnover

While poor performance is one reason employees are fired, previous research suggests it plays a limited role in explaining terminations. We argue that sociopolitical concerns play a role in determining who is terminated. Using field data from a U.S. health care company and experimental data using participants with supervisory experience, we show how the supervisor’s political concerns with the focal employee, which are contingent on the supervisor-employee political relationship and the way it is embedded within the workplace network, are related to dismissal decisions. Not only do we expect that a supervisor will be less likely to terminate an employee they see as a political ally and more likely to dismiss an adversary, but we also argue that a supervisor with fewer (more) alternative allies to the employee is less (more) likely to dismiss the employee. Additionally, a supervisor with numerous adversaries in their own network depends more heavily on the employee politically, making dismissal less likely, whereas if the employee has numerous adversaries, the supervisor has greater latitude to terminate the employee. Our findings contribute to research on involuntary turnover by showing that a social network approach to understanding organizational politics helps us understand why specific individuals are targeted for dismissal, above and beyond performance considerations

Who are the objects of positive and negative gossip at work?: A social network perspective on workplace gossip

Gossip is informal talking about colleagues. Taking a social network perspective, we argue that group boundaries and social status in the informal workplace network determine who the objects of positive and negative gossip are. Gossip networks were collected among 36 employees in a public child care organization, and analyzed using exponential random graph modeling (ERGM). As hypothesized, both positive and negative gossip focuses on colleagues from the own gossiper's work group. Negative gossip is relatively targeted, with the objects being specific individuals, particularly those low in informal status. Positive gossip, in contrast, is spread more evenly throughout the network. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Turnover During a Corporate Merger: How Workplace Network Change Influences Staying.

The upheaval created by a merger can precipitate voluntary employee turnover, causing merging organizations to lose valuable knowledge-based resources and competencies precisely when they are needed most to achieve the merger\u27s integration goals. While prior research has shown that employees\u27 connections to coworkers reduce their likelihood of leaving, we know little about how personal social networks should change to increase the likelihood of staying through the disruptive post-merger integration period. In a pre-post study of social network change, we investigate over 15 million email communications between employees within two large merging consumer goods firms over 2 years. We use insights from network activation theory to posit and find that employees with high formal power (rank) and high informal status (indegree centrality) react to the merger\u27s general uncertainty and threat by developing new social connections in a manner indicative of a network widening response: reaching out and connecting with those in the counterpart legacy organization. We also investigate whether increased personally felt threat in the form of merger-related job insecurity strengthens these relationships, finding it does in the case of high formal power. We also find that employees increasing their cross-legacy social connections is key in reducing those employees\u27 turnover after a merger. Our study suggests that network activation theory can be extended to explain network changes and not simply network cognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)