Research
Research
Shea, C., Chakravarti, A., Li, S., Menon, T., & Honka, E. (in press). Gender and Interracial Relationship Dissolution: Evidence from a Decade of Roommate Outcomes. Social Psychology Quarterly.
Abstract: Using a natural experiment at an elite college (1982–1991), we analyze roommate choices following random first-year assignments, during a period when the Asian-student population doubled. This design allows us to test how shifting demographics affect interracial tie dissolution. Focusing on White-Asian dyads, we find a significant gender divide: women exhibit consistently high rates of interracial relationship dissolution regardless of population composition, whereas men’s interracial ties are affected by population shifts, with tie dissolution increasing as minorities have more same-race outside options. These findings shift the study of intergroup contact from relationship formation to durability, demonstrating that opportunity structures shape interracial relationship dissolution in a setting largely free from self-selection processes that characterize most naturally-occurring ties.
Author(s): Krackhardt, D.* & Li, S.*
Abstract: Philos Ties are ties strong by virtue of their long and consistent history of interactions. Simmelian Ties are strong by virtue of being structurally reinforced in a clique. Combined, these constitute a typology of strong ties, and each theoretically leads to trust. This paper explores this typology as a predictor of trust in an organizational context. We examine the extent to which each type (Philos and Simmelian), as well as tie content (friendship, advice, innovative support, and collaboration), predicts dyadic trust in three separate departments of a high-tech company in China. In a fixed effect meta-analysis across the three departments, we find that advice, friendship, Philos, and Simmelian ties are consistently related to trust, although Simmelian ties and especially Philos ties are by far the stronger predictors in the full model. However, the combination of these two types of strong ties does not marginally lead to more trust — indeed, the Composite of having a Philos tie and a Simmelian tie simultaneously is negatively associated with trust across all three departments, when controlling for the main effects of Philos and Simmelian ties. We discuss the implications these results have for trust formation in organizations.
Stage: Accepted for publication in the Handbook of Trust & Social Networks
Li, S., Krackhardt, D., & Niezink, N. M. (2025). The Roles of Learning and Status Attainment in Successful Newcomer Socialization: Random Assignments to Complex Projects and Early Career Outcomes. Academy of Management Journal, 68(4), 787-817. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2023.1057.
Abstract: Newcomers’ early work experiences in an organization can considerably affect their socialization. While much of the literature on this topic has documented how certain organization-wide practices succeed or fail in molding newcomers into “good citizens,” little is known about how differentiated early experiences lead to varied socialization outcomes. To this end, we systematically examine the impact of early project team assignments on newcomers’ career kick-offs. We propose two distinct but complementary mechanisms––learning and status attainment––to explain why some newcomers achieve superior performance and quicker promotions. We theorize that being assigned to complex projects offers newcomers opportunities to build competence and gain social recognition. Leveraging longitudinal archival data from a high-tech company where newcomers were randomly assigned to projects during their first two years, we found that those assigned to more complex projects obtained more professional certifications, reported higher levels of learning, and appeared more frequently in the company’s internal newsletters. These outcomes were, in turn, associated with higher promotion rates, increased monetary rewards, and better supervisor evaluations. Additionally, we demonstrated that prior same-industry experience amplified the positive effects of project complexity on learning and status attainment. Our findings underscore the pivotal role of early assignments in shaping newcomers’ career development.
Media Coverage: "The Secret to Getting Promoted Quickly at a New Job." The Wall Street Journal (July 22, 2025) featured our research showing that employees who take on a complex, high-impact project early in a new role are more likely to be promoted quickly. Read the article.
Li, S., Krackhardt, D., & Niezink, N. M. D. (2024). The Importance of Project Status for Career Success: A Network Perspective. Journal of Management, 52(2), 453-483. https://doi.org/10.1177/01492063241282649.
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 provides evidence for the validity of using a 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 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 rapid promotions when assigned to high-status projects than their bottom- or top-level counterparts.
Li, S., Krackhardt, D., & Niezink, N. M. D. (2023). Do your friends stress you out? A field study of the spread of stress through a community network. 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.
Media Coverage: "Why Some People Are at Higher Risk of Stress Contagion." Psyche (June 29, 2023) featured our research showing how stress can spread through workplace networks, and why some individuals are more vulnerable. Read the article.
Author(s): Shihan Li
Abstract: High-status ties confer reputational benefits. Women appear to benefit less than men, but the stages at which this disadvantage arises remain underexplored. Taking a network-perception perspective, I develop a two-stage account of women’s disadvantage in the reputational returns to high-status ties. At acquisition, women are less likely than men to be seen as sought out by high-status others: high-status people’s advice-seeking from women less often gets recognized (staying hidden), and where no such tie exists, women are less likely than men to be imagined as sought out by high-status people for advice. At evaluation, even perceived high-status ties yield women smaller competence returns than men. In a year-long, four-wave study of roughly 800 employees at a high-tech firm, I distinguish among recognized, hidden, and imagined ties based on the (mis)alignment between actual and perceived networks. Women’s high-status ties prove systematically underperceived and underrewarded, lowering their salary growth and supervisor evaluations. I further identify that political skill can attenuate both gaps. My study locates network-based gender inequality in perception itself: what a woman’s network does for her depends not only on whom she connects with but on whom she is seen to connect with.
Stage: Revise and resubmit at Academy of Management Journal
Author(s): Eric Quintane, Sebastian Reiche, Shihan Li, Christian Troester, & Dongmei Song
Abstract: Voluntary turnover spreads to coworkers, yet why it catches some and spares others is not well understood. We examine how network size explains this variation by distinguishing two functions of workplace ties: channeling resources and sustaining coordination. We argue that these functions produce different forms of interdependence among ties, with opposite implications for how network size moderates the spread of coworker departures. Resource ties create substitution-based interdependence: larger networks buffer employees because remaining ties compensate for lost resources. Coordination ties create alignment-based interdependence: larger networks amplify turnover contagion because each departure forces the focal employee to realign her work with those who remain. Which effect dominates depends on the substitutability of the departing coworker’s resources and the coordination load of the focal employee’s role. We test these predictions in two field studies: a four-wave panel of 298 engineers in the R&D division of a drone manufacturer, and network and archival data on 1,431 employees in an express-delivery firm. Study 1 shows that the moderating effect of network size reverses across tie functions, attenuating contagion in instrumental support networks and amplifying it in workflow coordination networks. Study 2 complements Study 1 by showing that the same conditional logic operates when ties are multiplex: amplification intensifies when departing coworkers are non-substitutable and when focal employees occupy coordination-heavy roles. Together, the studies reveal a broader property of workplace networks: losses in resource ties are absorbed by remaining ties, while losses in coordination ties propagate through them.
Stage: Under review
Author(s): Jung Won Lee, Shihan Li, & Daniel Z. Levin
Abstract: A foundational assumption in social capital research is that mobilizing resources requires prior interaction. Indeed, without interaction, the other person would not even register as a network tie, let alone a valuable one. We challenge this assumption by introducing pseudo ties. Drawing on theories of parasocial interaction and cognitive networks, we argue that familiarity and feelings of closeness built only via indirect exposure—e.g., reading posts, following work, observing others in workplaces—can generate liking, thereby motivating willingness to provide and seek instrumental support. We test this theory in two studies. Study 1, a vignette experiment with U.S. employees who use X (Twitter) (N = 96), shows that pseudo ties elicit greater helping willingness than weak real-life ties, mediated by interpersonal liking. Study 2, a longitudinal field study in a Chinese aerospace firm (N = 749 employees, 14,616 dyads), replicates these findings with behavioral data: employees were more likely to provide and seek instrumental support from pseudo ties than from weak ties, due to interpersonal liking. These findings challenge the interaction assumption in social capital theory, showing that the affective component of tie strength can emerge without interaction and that perceived relationships outside observable networks can shape consequential organizational behavior.
Stage: Under review
Author(s): Brandy Aven* & Shihan Li*
Abstract: Research on team diversity focuses on demographic or functional differences among members and often points to members’ network variations as the main explanatory mechanism. Yet, these studies neglect to measure and account for social network roles as originally conceived by network scholars. Adopting the measure of brokerage role diversity (BRD), which is characterized by variations in team members’ brokering capabilities in inter-team networks, we contend that it provides a more proximal measure of the performance benefits for diverse teams. While BRD enhances performance by integrating resources from brokers and non-brokers, it can also create collaboration challenges due to competing external pressures and expectations. Analyzing five years of archival data from an international consulting firm, encompassing 60,088 employees and 26,855 projects, our results demonstrate that teams with high BRD not only achieved higher profits but also secured more follow-on client business, particularly when team members had prior experience with high BRD teams. These findings highlight the importance of structural roles in leveraging team diversity for improved performance in knowledge-intensive work.
Stage: Manuscript in preparation
Author(s): Shihan Li & Nynke M. Niezink
Abstract: Organizational commitment plays a pivotal role in employee retention. Yet, while many have considered how commitment affects retention, little is known about how colleagues’ turnover influences the organizational commitment of those who remain. Building upon the turnover event model, we theorize that when a person’s friends decide to quit, their organizational commitment dynamics strongly depend on the pre-exit organizational commitment of their turnover friends. We model the simultaneous dynamics of friendship networks and affective commitment based on longitudinal data collected in four survey waves among approximately 300 employees in the core R&D working units of a high-tech firm. We find that stayers’ affective commitment was more likely to decrease following the turnover of highly committed friends and to increase after the turnover of friends with low commitment. Additionally, women exhibited more substantial changes in organizational commitment in response to friends’ turnover events than men. Our findings highlight the nuanced interplay of social network dynamics and employees’ commitment dynamics, offering valuable insights for management practices aimed at employee retention.
Stage: Manuscript in preparation
Author(s): Catherine Shea* & Shihan Li*
Abstract: Professional women are encouraged to seek advice from prominent individuals in their social networks as a mechanism to obtain valuable information (i.e., networks as pipes) and reputational benefits (i.e., networks as prisms). However, emerging evidence suggests that the reputational benefits of networks are different for men and women, requiring women to manage a social perceptual hurdle when extracting information from networks. Merging literature on social perception, advice, and advice networks, we develop finer-grained advice network generators to examine whether participating in different advice network types influence (1) third party perceptions and (2) performance metrics. We link participation in different advice network types to differing social perceptions and demonstrate when and how these social perceptual penalties predict performance. Specifically, seeking advice related to hierarchy ascension leads to increased perceptions of dominance, which leads to a performance decrease for women and a performance increase for men. This suggests that the information garnered in this network cannot be leveraged to overcome the social perceptual backlash experienced by women. However, while seeking advice related to current task leads to decreased competence, an effect heightened for women, women’s performance is not impacted, suggesting that the information garnered in this network can be used to improve performance. We conclude that extant methods for eliciting advice networks are overly broad, shielding important variance that can explain why men and women see differential returns from professional networks.
Stage: Manuscript in preparation
Author(s): Shihan Li* & Rebekah Hong*
Abstract: Occupying brokerage positions in networks has been widely recognized as providing innovation advantages to employees by granting broad and timely access to diverse, nonredundant information, along with bargaining and arbitrating power to secure valuable resources. However, this established understanding is challenged when brokers span across distinct domains—a phenomenon we term cross-domain brokerage. In these situations, the social contacts bridged by brokers belong to different domains, characterized by divergent knowledge paradigms, norms, languages, and practices. We propose that cross-domain brokerage imposes substantial challenges on brokers, as the cognitive and social burdens arising from bridging incompatible or even conflicting social groups hinder brokers’ ability to effectively integrate diverse ideas and perspectives. Our study further investigates the strategic behaviors that brokers employ and the organizational contextual factors that enable the successful capitalization of cross-domain brokerage positions. Using two-wave longitudinal data from a high-tech Chinese firm, we found that cross-domain brokerage was negatively associated with innovative performance. However, this negative association was mitigated by brokers’ high separation and mediation orientations, particularly when the average organizational identification of the social contacts they bridged was low. Conversely, a tertius iungens orientation enhanced innovative performance when the social contacts’ average organizational identification was high. Our findings contribute to the networks and innovation literature by underscoring the unique challenges and contingencies of cross-domain brokerage, offering a nuanced understanding of the conditions under which this form of brokerage fosters positive innovative outcomes.
Stage: Manuscript in preparation
Author(s): Rebekah Hong* & Shihan Li*
Abstract: Seeking feedback is widely recognized as essential for refining and advancing novel ideas in organizations. However, we argue that feedback-seeking can be a double-edged sword: while it helps improve ideas, it can also diminish their originality, creating what we term the novelty-feedback paradox. This paradox arises because the perceived novelty of an idea shapes creators’ choices of feedback providers and, subsequently, the idea’s trajectory. We theorize that as creators perceive their ideas to be more novel, they develop heightened needs for instrumental resources (e.g., expertise and knowledge) and affective resources (e.g., emotional support and encouragement). These distinct resource needs influence whom creators seek out for feedback and shape the balance between sustaining idea novelty and improving idea usefulness. We tested these ideas through a multi-wave survey of employees in a high-tech organization. Our findings showed that creators with high perceived idea novelty were more likely to seek feedback from high-status colleagues when they prioritized instrumental resources, which enhanced idea usefulness but dampened novelty. In contrast, creators who sought affective resources gravitated toward lower-status colleagues, which preserved novelty but limited practical refinements. Additionally, psychological ownership moderated these dynamics: creators with strong psychological ownership prioritized instrumental resources, whereas those with lower ownership relied more on affective resources. Our study contributes to the creativity and innovation literature by shedding light on the nuanced effects of feedback-seeking behaviors in shaping the development of novel ideas. We emphasize the critical role of psychological ownership in influencing feedback choices and offer practical insights for organizations aiming to foster creativity without compromising originality.
Stage: Manuscript in preparation
Author(s): Shihan Li* & Rebekah Hong*
Abstract: Accurate network perception has been shown to enhance individuals’ power and lead to improved performance and career outcomes. However, most existing research treats network perception accuracy as static, overlooking its dynamic nature and the need to understand how accuracy changes over time and what drives it to improve. We address these questions by examining the turnover of workflow contacts as a cognitive reset point that prompts individuals to reassess and update their perceptions of workplace networks. Drawing on perceptual inertia, turnover events, and motivated cognition literatures, we argue that turnover events, particularly those involving high-status or central contacts, disrupt routines and trigger sensemaking processes that facilitate network perception change. We further propose that whether these changes result in improved accuracy depends on individual epistemic motivation. Using a four-wave longitudinal field study in the R&D center of a high-tech Chinese firm (N = 495 across 28 work units), we find that turnover is positively associated with perception change, especially when leavers are high-status or central. Moreover, perception change leads to improved accuracy only among individuals high in epistemic motivation. Accuracy gains, in turn, predict higher subsequent performance evaluations. These findings contribute to research on network cognition, turnover, and workplace adaptation by identifying when and for whom social disruption enhances the accuracy and value of network perceptions.
Stage: Manuscript in preparation
Author(s): David Krackhardt* & Shihan Li*
Abstract: We explore eigenvector centrality on different types of networks to determine the extent to which they portray status in an organizational context. First, we elicit informal network ties from participants in a set of departments in a mid-sized high-tech firm at four time periods. Second, we explored Breiger's (1974) fundamental duality insight that relating persons with the variety of groups they belong to can lead to additional structural understandings. We obtained individual-by-project two-mode data from the company records for these same four time periods. We calculated eigenvector centrality on three different network structures: 1) Individual-level informal networks within departments; 2) Person-by-person projection of the individual-by-project two-mode network; and 3) Project-by-project projection of the individual-by-project two-mode network. For individual-level status assessment, we obtained peer evaluations of each employee's status in the organization. For project-level status assessment, 21 senior managers ranked the status of all projects' extent at the time of the ranking. We found that most eigenvector-based measures positively predicted status. However, the strength of these predictions varied considerably. On average, individual-level status was only weakly predicted by eigenvectors of their informal network ties. By far the strongest predictors of status were found between project-level status and eigenvector centrality scores in the project-by-project projections. Commensurate with this result, we found that the most robust predictor of individual-level status was obtained by weighting the eigenvector centrality of the projects that an individual participated in by the amount of time the individual spent on each project.
Stage: Manuscript in preparation