The Hedges Have Eyes: Third-party Evaluation of Social Networking in Organizations

Research on social networking has focused almost exclusively on the ego-centric perspective of positive pursuit of network ties with alters. The pervasive context, which has received less attention, suggests that the ego-alter connection is surrounded by a series of active third-party observers, who can observe, evaluate and reciprocate to ego’s social networking behaviors. Taking a third-party perspective, we conducted three studies using both qualitative and quantitative designs to explore how third-party observers perceive and evaluate egos’ social networking behaviors. Based on an inductive analysis, Study 1 initially categorizes two distinct observed networking approaches within organizations: horizontal networking with colleagues and upward networking with leaders, and proposes a new framework revealing how third-party observers evaluate egos’ horizontal and upward networking across two dimensions: affective resources and information resources. A whole-network field survey in Study 2 empirically verifies that third-party observers are more likely to perceive egos as having affective resources when the latter are engaging in horizontal networking. Alternatively, third-party observers are more likely to perceive egos as having information resources when the latter are engaging in upward networking. An experiment in Study 3 fully replicates these findings. Multiple mediation analysis further shows that perceived affective resources play a salient mediating role in third parties’ tie preferences than perceived information resources in both friendship and task-related networks. In the end, we discuss contributions of our study to the integration of social network and psychological perspectives in organizational studies.