Publication database

This thesis investigates how the social embeddedness of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) impacts their firms’ decisions.

Within organizations, women remain to this day underrepresented in leadership roles. One key explanation for this focuses on differences in the way men and women socialize at the office and build professional network. Women’s networks are less likely to afford them early access to important and diverse information that would benefit their careers. In this paper, I investigate office spatial design as a managerial lever to shape employee networks, and its differential impact on male and female employees. Further, I study gender differences in the relationship between proximity in an office space, network tie formation, and network brokerage. Seating assignments that closely match the organization’s functional groupings add spatial segregation to the pre-existing occupational segregation between men and women. I argue that breaking functional silos in seating assignments can allow women, to a larger extent than men, to diversify their ties and to access more advantageous network positions. I use data from a quasi-field experiment where the seating plan of a Mexican company’s headquarters was manipulated with the aim to decrease work-interdependence between office neighbors. Following the office reconfiguration, I find that female employees are more likely than male employees to form friendship ties with their new desk neighbors and that women’s friendship networks are more likely to become more brokerage-rich. I also find evidence that women whose networks see an increase of brokerage following the reconfiguration tend to see their wage increase.

With permission of the Academy of Management

Although the topic of career regrets is of interest both to research and practice, the scholarly development of this field is still rather nascent. In particular, the knowledge about the occurrence and development of career regrets remains to be limited. Drawing on the qualitative data collected through individual reflections (N=50) and semi-structured interviews (N = 22), we explore the nature of an individual’s career regrets and how a career decision becomes a regret. Our findings suggest a broader understanding of career regrets that spreads beyond regrets that are tied to occupational choices. In line with this broad understanding of career regrets, we develop a framework of a career decision becoming a career regret. Our findings also show that when people reflect on career decisions in terms of how they should have behaved differently, there are some that they perceive as career regrets while others take a form of career mistakes or career realizations. We distinguish these different ways of viewing career decisions, suggesting that the latter two kinds of decisions are more influential in shaping an individual’s future career decisions than career decisions that are career regrets. Our research has important theoretical and practical implications concerning career regrets.

With permission of the Academy of Management

We seek to understand how individuals from different groups conceive, build and gain benefit from their social networks in order to be able to generate better predictions and interventions that could help more disadvantaged individuals to nurture more productive networks and extract greater gains from such networks. The projects included in the symposium tackle the idea of different network use and returns distinguishing categories of individuals along the lines of race, individual traits, and gender. The projects give insights on how actors that belong to specific social and demographic categories can use and leverage their networks to achieve positive outcomes and overcome their disadvantageous positions. Structural barriers, cognitive impediments, or beliefs about the other make minority groups unable to benefit from the networks in the same ways as the majority group. Yet, our symposium seeks to understand and propose different ways to solve the issue and create a better world in which all individuals have an equal opportunity to thrive, regardless of their group membership. With this symposium, we argue that there is a need to consider the different paths and conditions that impact individuals’ intentions to create, maintain, and utilize their network ties more closely, in order to deepen our understanding of individuals networking patterns and be able to implement effective interventions.

With permission of the Academy of Management

Does turnover travel through social networks and, if so, how? Extant literature suggests that turnover can spread from one departing employee to another through a social influence process. While this assumes the existence of social relations, we lack understanding of whether and how different types of relations affect the contagion process. We build on the turnover literature, which conceives social relations as resources individuals lose when their contacts leave, to distinguish between different types of social relations (instrumental, expressive, energy) and resource providers (peers, supervisors) and examine how their loss relates to turnover contagion. We draw on a unique network dataset of 1,432 employees in the Chinese subsidiary of a Dutch multinational including employees’ date of voluntary departure (271 turnover events). We estimate models inspired from the Relational Event Framework to trace the spread of departures through social ties over time and account for the effect of each departure on the networks of remaining employees. Our results are consistent with considering turnover contagion as resource loss. However, they also suggest that contagion is triggered when losing access to specific resources from particular providers. We elaborate on our results to propose a theory of network turnover contagion.

With permission of the Academy of Management

Markush structures are molecular skeletons containing not only specific atoms but al-so placeholders to represent broad sets of chemical (sub)structures. They allow a vast number of compounds (e.g., 10^16 different compounds within patent EP 0810 209) to be claimed in a patent application without having to specify every single chemical entity. While Markush structures raise important questions regarding the functioning of the patent system, innovation researchers have been surprisingly silent on the topic. This paper summarizes the ongoing policy debate about Markush structures and provides first empirical insights into how Markush structures are used in patent documents in the pharmaceutical industry and how they affect important outcomes in the patent prosecution process. While not causing frictions in the patent prosecution process, patent documents containing Markush structures have an increased likelihood to restrict the patentability of follow-on inventions and to hamper the entry of generic competition in the product market

With permission of the Academy of Management

Social network research has made considerable progress in understanding how certain network structures emerge and the extent to which they affect outcomes such as innovation or organizational performance. In recent years, however, scholars have agreed that we also need to have a better understanding of the relational content that flows through network ties. In this symposium, we attempt to push network research forward by incorporating network content into our current understanding, especially how the content of network ties is narrated by social actors. This symposium aims to encourage fruitful discussion among organizational scholars on the extent to which studying the narrative of network tie content extends our knowledge of the impact of network structures.

With permission of the Academy of Management

Extant literature on social capital has demonstrated the positive effects of brokerage on employee productivity, particularly in knowledge-intensive and creative environments. Yet, little is known about the interactions between employee brokerage and employee mobility to competitors, another common theme in the strategic human capital literature. We posit that employees in brokerage positions face unique information and exposure and have different external opportunities than their peers in more constrained network positions. However, as brokerage is an inherently local network position, we further argue that the effect of mobility on employee productivity is substantially different for those in brokerage positions versus those in constrained networks. Moreover, the nature of these consequences is contingent on the breadth of expertise of employees. Using a large, longitudinal sample of inventors working for the world’s major pharmaceutical firms, we find partial support for the interactive effects of brokerage, mobility, and productivity. The findings of this study contribute to the social capital literature on employee brokerage and to strategic human capital research on inventor mobility.

With permission of the Academy of Management

This dissertation proposes methods that bridge network science, machine-learning, and agent-based simulations to infer information about context-dependent relationships. The methods are applied to analyze and understand the roles and actions associated with organizational leadership. Findings indicate, among other things, that effective leadership, both as found in practice and in theory, may be more authoritative and hierarchical than is commonly asserted.