Research
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
People with power can come to believe that colleagues rely on them for advice more than those colleagues do. We show that power inflates these beliefs about being sought out, and that the illusion has a consequence: people go on to seek advice themselves from the colleagues they wrongly think depend on them.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology PDF
Extraversion has long been seen as one of the best predictors of who emerges as an informal leader, yet most studies measure leadership at a single point in time. We treat leadership as a network of who looks to whom, and that network changes. Across two large network studies, extraverts emerged and endured as informal leaders by losing some followers and gaining others, not by keeping the same ones. They lead different people over time and leave behind people who once saw them as a leader and no longer do.
Journal of Applied Psychology PDF
People often receive advice they did not ask for. Earlier theory held that unsolicited help feels threatening because it takes away autonomy, but advice differs from help: an advisor offers guidance without taking over the work. In a multi-organization network study, an experience-sampling study, and an online experiment, what mattered was how employees read the advisor’s motives. They tended to see unsolicited advice as self-serving, so they found it less useful, learned less from it, and reported smaller gains in performance. They saw solicited advice as prosocial, with the opposite effects.
Organization Science PDF
People act on the relationships they believe they have. This paper develops theory about two kinds of error: believing that someone considers you a friend, an advisor, or a rival when they do not, and failing to notice when they do. We set out where these false positives and false negatives come from, how they shape power, rivalry, brokerage, and knowledge sharing at work, and where future research could go.
Academy of Management Annals
Organizational research has largely treated personality as fixed. We review a growing body of evidence that personality changes during adulthood and that it does so in response to many features of working life. The paper explains what this means for theories of people in organizations and for anyone thinking about their own development at work.
Journal of Applied Psychology
A network offers opportunities only to someone who sees it accurately. We proposed that feeling powerful leads people to assume the contacts around them are already connected, so they overlook the gaps where they could act as a broker. We found support for these ideas in a field study at a marketing and media agency and an online experiment. The same sense of power also made people more willing to broker. Power raises the motivation to connect others while hiding the places where connecting them would matter most.
Psychological Science
People on low incomes tend to spend a larger share of their money on goods and services that signal status, which is thought to compensate for lower economic standing. We asked whether this holds for everyone. Using 12 months of actual spending records from 718 people, we found that extraverts were more likely than introverts to spend on status when their income was low. This is the first paper to demonstrate empirically, using real transactions of actual spending behavior, that the effect of income on spending depends on personality.
Journal of Organizational Behavior
This review brings together research on how personality relates to the positions people occupy in workplace networks. It takes stock of the main findings and suggests that new opportunities lie in studying how networks change over time, how personality affects who reaches out to whom and which pairs of people connect, and how a person’s position in a network may shape the way their personality is expressed.
Organization Science
Does success at work depend on who you are or on where you sit in the network? This meta-analysis of 138 studies brings the two explanations together. Self-monitoring emerged as an especially strong predictor of being sought out for advice and friendship and of holding brokerage positions, over and above other traits. Being sought for advice and work information predicted job performance and career success better than brokerage did. Personality and network position act together to shape performance and careers.
Society for Personality and Social Psychology: Character & Context
A piece about what our network churn research means for extraverted leaders.
Society for Personality and Social Psychology: Character & Context
An account of our research on how coworkers respond to advice they did not ask for.
Harvard Business Review
What the science of personality change means for people who want to become more conscientious at work.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
A cross-disciplinary collaboration on the metabolic basis of how people adapt to low-oxygen environments such as Mount Everest.
Administrative Science Quarterly
Burt asks whether it pays to be connected to well-connected people. Drawing on studies of managers, bankers, and analysts, he concludes that the advantages of brokerage come from a person’s own immediate contacts and not from their contacts’ networks. We review the evidence and the exceptions he identifies, such as outsiders who benefit from a well-placed partner inside an organization.
A Handbook of the Psychology of Intelligence Analysis
Book chapter in a handbook edited by R. L. Rees.