Assignments to Complex Projects and Early Career Advantages: The Mechanisms of Learning and Status Attainment
Author(s): Shihan Li, David Krackhardt, Nynke M. Niezink
Abstract: Providing opportunities for employees, especially those in early careers, to build competence and increase recognition is critical for employees’ personal growth in project-based organizations. Yet, little attention has been paid to how organizations can shape newcomers’ learning and status attainment experiences through project assignments. We theorize that the extent to which newcomers acquire expertise and publicly acknowledged social esteem through working on their assigned projects varies as a function of project complexity level. Learning and status attainment lead to positive performance and psychological outcomes. We leveraged a field experiment in a high-tech company where newcomers were randomly assigned to projects during their first two years of tenure to empirically test our hypotheses. Treating a project as a network of actions, we conceptualize two distinct dimensions of complexity – component complexity and coordination complexity. We found that newcomers randomly assigned to projects with higher coordination or component complexity earned more professional certificates, higher self-report learning scores, and more appearances in the company’s internal newsletter. These, in turn, led to a higher promotion speed, 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 individual factors amplifying the positive effects of coordination and component complexity on learning.
Stage: Manuscript prepared for submission
Political Skill, Network Perceptions, and Work Outcomes
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
A New Perspective of Corporate Entrepreneurs’ Brokerage and Upward Mobility
Author(s): Shihan Li
Stage: Manuscript prepared for submission