Dormant tie reactivation as an affiliative coping response to stressors during the COVID-19 crisis.

This study takes an affiliative coping theory perspective to examine whether working adults reactivated dormant ties with individuals they had not contacted for at least 3 years to cope with stressors experienced due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Stressors originating in the workplace (job insecurity and remote work) and in the family (stressful familial social ties) were examined in a sample of 232 working adults in the southeastern United States. Individuals were more likely to reactivate their dormant ties when their job was insecure, and the magnitude of the reactivations was greater among individuals experiencing stressful social ties with family members than those not experiencing those stressors. We also found that there was a significant interaction between remote work and having a stressful tie within the household in dormant tie reactivation. Although previous theory has focused mostly on the benefits of frequent, active social relationships for coping, our results suggest that reactivating dormant ties might be a coping mechanism as well. Our study also suggests that workplace dormant tie research should broaden its focus beyond exchanged instrumental support to consider emotional support that might be transferred during reactivation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Turnover during a corporate merger: How workplace network change influences staying.

The upheaval created by a merger can precipitate voluntary employee turnover, causing merging organizations to lose valuable knowledge-based resources and competencies precisely when they are needed most to achieve the merger's integration goals. While prior research has shown that employees' connections to coworkers reduce their likelihood of leaving, we know little about how personal social networks should change to increase the likelihood of staying through the disruptive post-merger integration period. In a pre-post study of social network change, we investigate over 15 million email communications between employees within two large merging consumer goods firms over 2 years. We use insights from network activation theory to posit and find that employees with high formal power (rank) and high informal status (indegree centrality) react to the merger's general uncertainty and threat by developing new social connections in a manner indicative of a network widening response: reaching out and connecting with those in the counterpart legacy organization. We also investigate whether increased personally felt threat in the form of merger-related job insecurity strengthens these relationships, finding it does in the case of high formal power. We also find that employees increasing their cross-legacy social connections is key in reducing those employees' turnover after a merger. Our study suggests that network activation theory can be extended to explain network changes and not simply network cognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

An alter-centric perspective on employee innovation: The importance of alters' creative self-efficacy and network structure.

While most social network studies of employee innovation behavior examine the focal employees' ("egos'") network structure, we employ an alter-centric perspective to study the personal characteristics of employees' network contacts-their "alters"-to better understand employee innovation. Specifically, we examine how the creative self-efficacy (CSE) and innovation behavior of employees' social network contacts affects their ability to generate and implement novel ideas. Hypotheses were tested using a sample of 144 employees in a U.S.-based product development organization. We find that the average CSE of alters in an employee's problem solving network is positively related to that employee's innovation behavior, with this relationship being mediated by these alters' average innovation behavior. The relationship between the alters' average innovation behavior and the employee's own innovation behavior is strengthened when these alters have less dense social networks. Post hoc results suggest that having network contacts with high levels of CSE also leads to an increase in ego's personal CSE 1 year later in cases where the employee's initial level of CSE was relatively low. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record

Employees' responses to an organizational merger: Intraindividual change in organizational identification, attachment, and turnover.

The authors used pre-post merger data from 599 employees experiencing a major corporate merger to compare 3 conceptual models based on the logic of social identity theory (SIT) and exchange theory to explain employees' merger responses. At issue is how perceived change in employees' own jobs and roles (i.e., personal valence) and perceived change in their organization's status and merger appropriateness (i.e., organizational valence) affect their changing organizational identification, attachment attitudes, and voluntary turnover. The first model suggests that organizational identification and organizational attachment develop independently and have distinct antecedents. The second model posits that organizational identification mediates the relationships between change in organizational and personal valence and change in attachment and turnover. The third model posits that change in personal valence moderates the relationship between changes in organizational valence and in organizational identification and attachment. Using latent difference score (LDS) modeling in an SEM framework and survival analysis, the results suggest an emergent fourth model that integrates the first and second models: Although change in organizational identification during the merger mediates the relationship between change in personal status and organizational valence and change in attachment, there is a direct and unmediated relationship between change in personal valence and attachment. This integrated model has implications for M&A theory and practice. (PsycINFO Database Record

Positive and negative workplace relationships, social satisfaction, and organizational attachment.

We examine how employees' centrality in the networks of positively valenced ties (e.g., friendship, advice) and negatively valenced ties (e.g., avoidance) at work interact to affect these employees' organizational attachment. Using 2 different samples (154 employees in a division of a food and animal science organization and 144 employees in a product development firm), we found that employees' centrality in positive and negative tie networks at work were related to their organizational attachment indirectly via their impact on employees' satisfaction with their workplace relationships. Further, interaction results in both studies suggest that the effect of employees' centrality in positive tie networks on their satisfaction with workplace social relationships was stronger when employees had more negative relationships but was irrelevant when employees had fewer negative ties. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.