Skill in Interpersonal Networks.

Abstract

I study the cognitive and behavioral skills that people use to navigate social networks at work, via three separate but related papers. Paper 1 argues that relational schemas, which are the cognitive schemas that people use to guide interactions with other people (Baldwin 1992), are developed over time through exposure to others. However, having a lower variety of schemas (employing generic schemas for multiple relationships) enables a person to interact with more people using fewer cognitive resources (Abelson 1981), but having a greater variety of schemas (having unique schemas for each relation) enables a person to better adapt to the needs of each relationship. Using in-depth interviews, network data, and interaction data from an administrative department of a manufacturing organization, I find a curvilinear relationship between both social experience and network contacts in an environment and the degree to which people develop more specific relational schemas, providing evidence for this tension between the need to adapt to each relationship versus the constraint of cognitive overload. Paper 2 argues that social network position cannot precisely measure access to information flows in a social context. I develop a new method for measuring access to information, using time-ordered communication/interaction data, which accounts for the temporal ordering of communication and the constraints of time, scheduling, and other factors that cause variation in the frequency of communication across and within relationships. Paper 3 focuses on relational acumen, the ability to accurately perceive the strength of one’s relationships. Relational acumen is a form of network perception accuracy, a cognitive skill that provides a basis of power in organizations (Krackhardt 1990). I argue that people who have higher access to social information flows have greater relational acumen. Using data from the same organization, I find that network brokers have greater relational acumen – they are more accurate in perceiving their strong ties. More importantly, I find that having interactions that are in the midst of others’ interactions throughout the day (what I call “interaction efficiency”) provides the greatest benefit for relational acumen. Thus, how one interacts with contacts matters more than who one’s contacts are.PHDBusiness Administration and SociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/99782/1/ncotton_1.pd