Research

Do Your Friends Stress You Out? A Field Study of the Spread of Stress through a Community Network

Shihan Li, David Krackhardt, & Nynke M. Niezink. (2023). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 125(1), 100–116. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000415

Abstract: In this study, we seek to understand how stress changes in dynamic social systems. Where prior work on the interpersonal transmission of stress focused on pairs of individuals and small groups, we adopt a network perspective to investigate how the distribution of stress in an individual’s social environment influences their stress appraisal process. We conducted a six-month longitudinal study of 315 early- to mid-career adults in professional master’s programs as they encountered the stress of everyday academic life. We follow the dynamics of the participants’ networks and their concomitant stress at four key time points during those six months. We find that the perceived stress of one's social contacts affects their experience of stress in this setting. Yet, not everyone is equally susceptible to this social influence.  In particular, we find that social influence is substantially amplified under conditions of relative consensus among one’s social contacts. Also, a low level of neuroticism, a high level of conscientiousness, and a high level of internal control orientation help buffer the transmission of stress.  

Why Some People Are at Higher Risk of ‘Stress Contagion’

Shihan Li. Psyche. A short idea online article based on "Do Your Friends Stress You Out? A Field Study of the Spread of Stress through a Community Network."

[Title redacted for review; Topic: status and career]

Author(s): Shihan Li, David Krackhardt, & Nynke M. Niezink

Abstract: Employees’ career trajectories in project-based organizations are closely associated with their project participation history. Yet, little is known about what features make a project stand out as a career booster for its participants and who obtains more career benefits than others from working on “hotshot” projects. In this study, we focus on a unique feature of projects – project status – and theorize about potential network-related sources from which it derives. Specifically, we develop arguments for how the pattern of a project’s social relations with other projects in the project network reflects the project’s status. Then, we deduce hypotheses regarding the impact of project status on employees’ career advancement and the moderating role of one’s hierarchical level in this relationship, drawing on the literature on status diffusion, endorsement, evaluative uncertainty, and attribution. Our empirical examinations entailed two studies. Study 1 provided preliminary evidence for the validity of using the network structural feature of a project to indicate its status using data from a high-tech company’s R&D projects. Study 2 tested our hypotheses by leveraging a sample of over 1000 IT specialists in a multinational accounting firm tracked over five years. We found that employees assigned to averagely higher-status projects received faster promotions. This career advantage was moderated by a person’s organizational hierarchical level in a complex way such that middle-level people obtained more speedy promotions when assigned to averagely high-status projects than their bottom- or top-level counterparts.

Stage: Under 2nd round review at Journal of Management

[Title redacted for review; Topic: intervention and intergroup relations]

Author(s): Shihan Li & Nynke M. Niezink

Abstract: The increasingly demographically diverse college population provides students with the opportunity to establish social relations across racial and national boundaries. Yet, various personal, social, and structural factors, such as people’s intrinsic preference for homophily and minorities’ overrepresentation in specific extracurricular activities, make that segregation between social groups remains a salient and persisting issue. Our study shows that a short-term, intentionally designed intergroup contact intervention at the beginning of students’ enrollment can dramatically revert this unfavorable situation. Our findings suggest that when students of different races or from different countries are assigned to the same orientation squad, they are more likely to befriend outgroup squadmates than outgroup members from other squads. Adopting an evolutionary perspective of gender differences in ingroup and outgroup attitudes and behaviors, we argue that females react more positively to the intergroup contact intervention than males. We indeed find evidence that the facilitating effect of the orientation squad on the formation of inter-racial or inter-national friendship ties with squadmates is more substantial for female than for male students.

Stage: Under review

[Title redacted for review; Topic: learning from complexity]

Author(s): Shihan Li, David Krackhardt, & Nynke M. Niezink

Abstract: Project assignments substantially shape employees’ career trajectories in project-based organizations but have received little scholarly attention. We theorize two fundamentally distinct and complementary mechanisms – individual human capital and socially constructed advantage – to explain why some people achieve better performance and psychological outcomes than others through their assigned projects. The individual mechanism focuses on learning – how project assignments enable one to acquire expertise and build competence; the social mechanism focuses on status attainment – how project assignments provide opportunities to obtain publicly acknowledged social esteem. To empirically test these two mechanisms, we leveraged longitudinal archival data provided by a high-tech company wherein newcomers were randomly assigned to projects during their first two years of tenure. We considered two distinct dimensions of complexity – component complexity and coordination complexity – and examined the extent to which each dimension contributed to learning versus status. We found that newcomers randomly assigned to projects with higher coordination and component complexity earned more professional certificates, higher self-report learning scores, and more appearances in the company’s internal newsletters. These, in turn, led to a higher promotion rate, monetary reward, supervisor evaluation, organizational identification, and affective commitment. We further showed that a newcomer’s rank level and prior experience in the same industry were critical job resources amplifying the positive effects of coordination and component complexity on learning.

Stage: Revise and resubmit at Academy of Management Journal

Workplace Politics, Network Image Management, and Career Advantages

Author(s): Shihan Li

Abstract: Research affirms that how a person’s social relations are perceived by their colleagues can significantly impact their workplace experience. Those perceived as having connections to prominent figures often enjoy more excellent performance and evaluative advantages. However, little is known about what factors influence the perception of social ties in the workplace. My novel study proposes that one’s political skill positively impacts colleagues’ attentional processes, leading to their more favorable perceptions of one’s social relations, which, in turn, benefit one’s work outcomes. I also posit that gender plays a complex moderating role in these processes, with women being better able to leverage political skill to be perceived as having high-status ties due to their higher interpersonal sensitivity yet benefiting less from such perceptions due to gender role expectations. I surveyed 800 employees in a high-tech company over three waves. I found that employees high in political skill were more likely to be perceived as having connections to high-status actors, even accounting for their actual social ties. Those perceived as having averagely higher-status social contacts later experienced increased job satisfaction, more pronounced salary increases, better supervisor evaluations, and decreased burnout. My results also supported the idea that political skill increased women’s perceived high-status ties more substantially. Still, the work outcome-related benefits of these perceptions were more robust for men.

Stage: Manuscript prepared for submission

Brokerage Role Diversity, Experience Overlap, and Project Success

Author(s): Shihan Li & Brandy Aven

Abstract: Teams benefit from various types of diversity. Notably, performance advantages have been found to accrue to teams with a high brokerage diversity – consisting of brokers who expand social ties to disparate parties that are not directly connected and non-brokers who are embedded in cohesive social surroundings where many neighbors share third parties. While brokers and non-broker bring different types of social capital to teams, they likely confront a collaboration issue due to a lack of common routines, norms, and expectations. This caveat may compromise teams’ potential to fully capitalize on a brokerage role diversity. We propose that one critical condition that may help alleviate this concern is when members’ past experiences overlap. Shared experience can engender trust between brokers and non-brokers, make them more tolerant of dissimilarity in their structural roles, and facilitate cross-understanding, collective interpretation, and knowledge integration. Leveraging a sample of 26,855 project teams in a large international consulting firm of 60,088 employees over a five-year period, we examined the relationship between teams’ brokerage role diversity, members’ experience overlap, and team success. We found that teams with a higher brokerage role diversity were, on average, more likely to increase the projects’ profitability and obtain positive client responses. Further, we showed this advantage was primarily realized when there was a high correspondence among members’ past experience across various consulting service areas. Our research has implications for organizations attempting to improve their project teams’ performance and understand network mechanisms contributing to performance.

Stage: Manuscript prepared for submission

Who Stays Together? Gender and Interracial Relationship Maintenance Across a 10 Year Period

Author(s): Catherine Shea, Arjun Chakravarti, Shihan Li, Elisabeth Honka, & Tanya Menon

Abstract: When organizations create diverse groups, a key question is whether they are sustainable. We consider the phenomenon of male and female differences in sustaining interracial relationships. We collected and analyzed a decade of data, in which university administrators randomly assigned incoming first-year students to roommates, and months later, students chose their own second-year roommates. This decade coincides with an increase in one minority population (Asian) and a stable level of a second minority group (Black). Prior to the diversification, female interracial pairs exhibited higher rates of dissolution. However, as population-level diversity increased, male interracial pairs involving the growing Asian group only dissolved at higher rates, equal to female pairs. Given that female inter-racial relationships were initially more likely to disband, we highlight the need for deeper theorizing about how women’s stronger relational orientation can pose challenges for interracial relationships. We discuss implications for building and sustaining diverse groups, and the importance of targeting different mechanisms than currently utilized in organizational diversity initiatives. 

Stage: Manuscript prepared for submission

Intra-incubator Networks and Angel Funding Outcomes

Author(s): Shihan Li

Stage: Manuscript prepared for submission

Genderization of Advice: Disambiguating the Advice Networks of Men and Women

Author(s): Catherine Shea & Shihan Li

Stage: Manuscript prepared for submission

Changing Commitment After Friends’ Turnover? The Roles of Leavers’ Commitment and Stayers’ Gender

Author(s): Shihan Li & Nynke M. Niezink

Stage: Manuscript prepared for submission