Landis, B., Jachimowicz, J., Wang, D., & Krause, R. 2022. Revisiting extraversion and leadership emergence: A social network churn perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 123: 811-829.
One of the classic relationships in personality psychology is that extraversion is associated with emerging as an informal leader. However, recent findings raise questions about the longevity of extraverted individuals as emergent leaders. Here, we adopt a social network churn perspective to study the number of people entering, remaining in, and leaving the leadership networks of individuals over time. We propose that extraverted individuals endure as emergent leaders in networks over time, but experience significant changes in the people being led, including the loss of people who once considered them a leader but now no longer do. In Study 1 (N = 545), extraverted individuals had a larger number of new and remaining people in their leadership networks, but also lost more people, above and beyond differences in initial leadership network size. In Study 2 (N = 764), we replicated and extended these results in an organizational sample while controlling for alternative explanations such as formal rank, network size, self-monitoring, and narcissism. Extraversion predicted the number of people entering, remaining in, and leaving leadership networks over time. Our findings suggest that while extraverted individuals tend to emerge as leaders, they are also more likely to experience greater network churn—they tend to lead different people over time and leave people in their wake who once perceived them a leader but now no longer do. We discuss the challenges posed by this network churn perspective for extraverted emergent leaders and highlight its importance for our understanding of extraversion and emergent leadership.
Extraversion and Leader Network Churn PDF
Landis, B., Fisher, C., & Menges, J. 2022. How employees react to unsolicited and solicited advice in the workplace: Implications for using advice, learning, and performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107: 408-424.
Employees are often reluctant to ask for advice, despite its potential benefits. Giving employees unsolicited advice may be a way to realize the benefits of advice without relying on them to ask for it. However, for these benefits to surface, it is critical to understand how employees react to unsolicited and solicited advice. Here, we suggest that recipients are likely to attribute self-serving motives to those providing unsolicited advice and prosocial motives to those providing solicited advice. These motives shape the extent to which recipients use advice, learn from it, and perform better as a result of receiving it. In an organizational network study of unsolicited and solicited advice ties (Study 1), an experience-sampling study of daily episodes of receiving unsolicited and solicited advice across two workweeks (Study 2), and an experiment where we manipulated advice solicitation and whether the advisor was a friend or a coworker (Study 3), we found general support for our model. Moderation analyses revealed that recipient reactions were not affected by friendship with the advisor, the number of overlapping advice ties between the advisor and recipient, or the position of the advisor in the social network. By showing how perceptions of the advisor’s motive can explain variability in the impact of unsolicited and solicited advice on recipients, this research clarifies the recipient reactions that advisors must navigate if their advice is to have impact at work.
Employee Reactions to Unsolicited Advice PDF
Byron, K., & Landis, B. 2020. Relational misperceptions in the workplace: New frontiers and challenges. Organization Science, 31: 223-242.
Understanding the social landscape at work helps employees accomplish organizational goals. A growing body of evidence, however, suggests people are fallible perceivers of their work relationships. People do not always know how much others trust (or distrust) them, consider them a friend (or enemy), or rely on them for advice or information at work. Such relational misperceptions may be especially likely in the context of work organizations. Here, we develop theoretical accounts to explain how and why employees misinterpret the nature of their relationships with others at work—and what consequences ensue when they do. We direct attention to five key opportunities for future research on when and why relational misperceptions occur and matter in organizations. Building on the small body of organizational research and larger body of non-organizational research on relationship misperception, we also identify areas that may be fruitful for exploration, highlighting several topics in the organizational literature that could be enlivened by considering the role of relational misperceptions. For example, we consider how employees’ relational misperceptions may affect how influential they are at work, how effectively they lead others, and how they navigate the social landscape in organizations.
Tasselli, S., Kilduff, M., & Landis, B. 2018. Personality change: Implications for organizational behavior. Academy of Management Annals, 12: 467-493.
This article focuses on an emergent debate in organizational behavior concerning personality stability and change. We introduce foundational psychological research concerning whether individual personality, in terms of traits, needs, and personal constructs, is fixed or changeable. Based on this background, we review recent research evidence on the antecedents and outcomes associated with personality change. We build on this review of personality change to introduce new directions for personality research in organizational behavior. Specifically, we discuss how a view of personality as changeable contributes to key topics for organizational behavior research, and how this new approach can help broaden and deepen the scope of personality theory and measurement. The study of personality change offers a range of new ideas and research opportunities for the study of organizational behavior.
Landis, B., Kilduff, M., Menges, J., & Kilduff, G. 2018. The paradox of agency: Feeling powerful reduces brokerage opportunity recognition yet increases willingness to broker. Journal of Applied Psychology.
Research suggests positions of brokerage in organizational networks provide many benefits, but studies tend to assume everyone is equally able to perceive and willing to act on brokerage opportunities. Here we challenge these assumptions in a direct investigation of whether people can perceive brokerage opportunities and are willing to broker. We propose that the psychological experience of power diminishes individuals’ ability to perceive opportunities to broker between people who are not directly connected in their networks, yet enhances their willingness to broker. In Study 1, we find that employees in a marketing and media agency who had a high sense of power were likely to see fewer brokerage opportunities in their advice networks. In Study 2, we provide causal evidence for this claim in an experiment where the psychological experience of power is manipulated. Those who felt powerful, relative to those who felt little power, tended to see fewer brokerage opportunities than actually existed, yet were more willing to broker, irrespective of whether there was a brokerage opportunity present. Collectively, these findings present a paradox of agency: Individuals who experience power are likely to underperceive the very brokerage opportunities for which their sense of agency is suited.
Landis, B., & Gladstone, J. 2017. Personality, income, and compensatory consumption: Low-income extraverts spend more on status. Psychological Science, 28: 1518-1520.
Research documents the tendency for low-income individuals to spend more of their money on high-status products and services. In a novel data set of 718 individuals who provided full access to their bank records over a twelve-month period, we offer empirical evidence showing that the link between low income and status spending depends upon the person: Extraverts, relative to introverts, spend more money on status when poor (as a percentage of their total spending and as a raw amount). These findings highlight the need to consider personality differences in theories of how low income affects spending behaviors, and offer a way in which personality research can deepen our understanding of who may be likely to engage in behaviors that perpetuate the conditions of financial hardship.
Personality, Poverty, and Status Spending PDF
Landis, B. 2016. Personality and social networks in organizations: A review and future directions. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 37: S107-S121.
Recent research linking individuals’ personality characteristics to their social networks has brought a new understanding of how individual patterns of behavior affect networks in organizations. This review summarizes the major advancements in the three areas of social network research relevant to organizational behavior: (a) brokerage and structural holes; (b) network centrality and network size; and (c) strength of ties. This review also provides an agenda outlining three key opportunities for future research. These opportunities involve personality and social network change, bidirectional and dyadic processes, and the potential effect of network position on personality expression.
Personality and Networks Review PDF
Fang*, R., Landis*, B., Zhang, Z., Anderson, M., Shaw, J., & Kilduff, M. 2015. Integrating personality and social networks: A meta-analysis of personality, network position, and work outcomes in organizations. Organization Science, 26: 1243-1260. [*Authors contributed equally]
Using data from 138 independent samples, we meta-analytically examined three research questions concerning the roles of personality and network position in organizations. First, how do different personality characteristics—self-monitoring and the Big Five personality traits—relate to indegree centrality and brokerage, the two most studied structurally advantageous positions in organizational networks? Second, how do indegree centrality and brokerage compare in explaining job performance and career success? Third, how do these personality variables and network positions relate to work outcomes? Our results show that self-monitoring predicted indegree centrality (across expressive and instrumental networks) and brokerage (in expressive networks) after controlling for the Big Five traits. Self-monitoring, therefore, was especially relevant for understanding why people differ in their acquisition of advantageous positions in social networks. But the total variance explained by personality ranged between 3% and 5%. Surprisingly, we found that indegree centrality was more strongly related to job performance and career success than brokerage. We also found that personality predicted job performance and career success above and beyond network position and that network position partially mediated the effects of certain personality variables on work outcomes. This paper provides an integrated view of how an individual’s personality and network position combine to influence job performance and career success.