Too Much of a Good Thing: Downsides of a Large Social Network and Moderating Effects of Political Skill

Abstract 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. 摘要： 现有文献在考察个体社交网络中心度和工作绩效之间的曲线关系时，往往聚焦于信息接收者的视角。本研究站在信息/建议提供者的角度，基于社会交换理论来推断：其建议的网络中心度与其工作绩效呈现倒U型的关系，因为维护与建议接受者的关系，会出现收益递减而成本递增的趋势。此外，建议提供者过高的网络中心度，会使他们成为高效工作流程的瓶颈，从而成为同事工作中的阻碍。我们的研究结果支持上述推论，同时表明，建议提供者的政治技能有助于克服其网络中心度带来的人际挑战。那些政治技能高的个体可以更好地将与建议接收者的关系，转化为有助于和同事开展合作的资源，从而减少同事设置的障碍。总的来说，我们从社会交换的视角解读了建议提供者与接受者关系中的利弊权衡，并考察了政治技能对建议网络的负面影响产生的重要缓解作用。