01:35 pm
Negative experiences and negative ties: An analysis of the interdynamics of perceived exposure to workplace bullying and positive and negative social relations at work
Christian Steglich | Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University | Sweden
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Authors:
Birgit Pauksztat | University of Greenwich | United Kingdom
Denise Salin | Hanken School of Economics | Finland
Christian Steglich | Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University | Sweden
The aim of this study was to analyze how employees’ position in the social network affects their exposure to bullying behaviours, and how this exposure in turn affects their positive ties (“friendship”) and negative ties (“difficult” relations) at work. Thus, the study explores the interdynamics of perceptions of negative behaviours and negative and positive relationships.
Longitudinal data on perceived exposure to bullying behaviours (NAQ – short version) and network data on relationship quality (friendship relations; difficult relations) were collected in eight small and medium-sized organizations in Finland. Hypotheses were tested based on two waves of data (n = 249) using stochastic actor-oriented modeling. Given the multilevel nature of the data (respondents nested in organizations), different approaches for analyzing the data were explored.
Contrary to expectations, initial analyses suggest that neither degree centrality in the network of difficult relations, nor degree centrality in the friendship network at T1 had any effect on perceived exposure to bullying behaviours (T2). However, respondents who experienced higher exposure to bullying behaviours at T1 reported both more friendships (endowment effect) and more difficult relations (creation effect) at T2. This suggests that at the group level, bullying might contribute to group polarization. Also, employees’ exposure to bullying behaviours was affected by the bullying behaviours experienced by their friends, perhaps pointing to social influence effects.
01:55 pm
Bi-polar hierarchies: A study on the structure of coordination and control in Wikipedia
Juergen Lerner | University of Konstanz | Germany
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Juergen Lerner | University of Konstanz | Germany
Alessandro Lomi
Peer-production of Wikipedia articles leads to emergent structures of coordination and control among contributing users. Besides discussion on talk pages, most coordination takes place through co-editing activities performed directly on the articles. Users can undo contributions of other users or can restore text that has been previously deleted. There are at least two competing explanations for the structure of these signed edit-networks: (1) the structural balance interpretation that users undoing each others' edits belong to different factions having conflicting opinions and (2) the hierarchical interpretation that users with higher status or excellence dominate others. In this talk we present several ways how these alternative hypotheses can be tested against each other. We propose further hypotheses linking the structure of the group of contributing users with team performance and output quality and present initial empirical support.
02:15 pm
Network antecedents of catch22-routines: Damned if you do, damned if you don’t
Christine Moser | VU University Amsterdam | Netherlands
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Christine Moser | VU University Amsterdam | Netherlands
Many organizations rely on the stability and continuity that organizational routines provide. Organizational routines are repetitive, recognizable patterns of interdependent actions, involving multiple actors and are key to organizational performance. Recent studies have emphasized the important role of organizational routines in both stability and change in organizations. Scholars distinguish between rules and procedures that have been formulated by management; and the actual work practice- e.g., how these rules are carried out on a day-to-day basis. The terms “ostensive” and “performative” indicate these two dimensions: ostensive refers to abstract patterns, and performative to specific actions.
However, routines that are unavoidable yet harmful for organizations – what I call “catch22-routines” – have not yet been researched. In this paper, I develop a novel understanding of organizational routines, specifically I focus on catch22-routines which are organizational routines that (a) fulfil the requirements of organizational routines (multiple actors carry out repetitive and recognizable interdependent actions); in addition (b) cannot be avoided and (c) are harmful for organizations, whichever course of action they choose: damned if they do, but equally damned if they don’t. In particular, I will conceptualize and define these routines, and develop theory on the antecedents on catch22-routines. To that end, I draw on network theory to explain the underlying theoretical mechanisms of catch22-routines. Given the ambiguous nature of these routines, the possible antecedents of catch22-routines must lie in positive as well as negative organizational relationships. In the paper, I will develop propositions that address the ambiguous nature of the routines in conjunction with positive and negative network antecedents. I conclude with implications for theory and practice.
02:35 pm
The good and the bad - The Role of Balance, Status and Homophily in a Signed Tie Online Network in Germany
Alexander Polte
Markus Gamper
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Authors:
Alexander Polte
Markus Gamper
Most of signed ties research concentrates on the investigation of relationships between adolescents or children in schools (e.g. friendship and bully-victim relations). Those networks are often of moderate size so that it is quite feasible to analyze them using multivariate exponential random graph models (ERGMs). In contrast to that, networks from online-data may be very large and difficult to model within an acceptable amount of time. This might be a reason for the relative rarity of studies that model signed ties in online social networks.
The submitted paper aims to fill this research gap by cross-sectional modelling of 'positive' contacting relations and 'negative' ignoring relations of a regionally based online social network. More precisely we analyse the signed relations between subset of 3305 members from the former online social network "partyface.de", that are living in the town of Bitburg (Germany) and test the hypothesis regarding Homophily, Balance theory and Status theory.