Too much of a good thing: downsides of a large social network and moderating effects of political skill

Existing research examining the curvilinear relationship between network centrality and performance tends to focus on the information recipients' perspective. Focusing on the information providers' perspective, our study draws upon social exchange theory to demonstrate that the advice-givi...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chen, Yi, Boh, Wai Fong, Wong, Sze Sze, Shao, Jun
Other Authors: Nanyang Business School
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/170312
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
Description
Summary:Existing research examining the curvilinear relationship between network centrality and performance tends to focus on the information recipients' perspective. Focusing on the information providers' perspective, our study draws upon social exchange theory to demonstrate that the advice-giving centrality-performance relationship for information providers has an inverse U-shape due to decreasing benefits and increasing costs of maintaining more advice-giving ties. We further show that increasing advice-giving centrality increases the likelihood that individuals would become a hindrance to coworkers, as they become bottlenecks impeding efficient workflow. However, our study demonstrates that political skill enables them to overcome the interpersonal challenges associated with high advice-giving centrality. Specifically, individuals with high political skills can better convert advice-giving ties to resources that could assist their cooperation with coworkers, reducing the hindrance they impose. Overall, we provide insights into the trade-off between the benefits and costs of advice-giving ties from a social exchange perspective and examine political skill as an important mitigator of the downsides of large advice-giving networks - a key area that has been hitherto largely unexplored.