Prior research has highlighted that network sparseness and network centrality enhance innovativeness through access to information and influence, respectively. We advance this perspective by exploring the extent to which individual actions are needed to mobilize information and influence accessed through social networks, and whether such information and influence would mutually reinforce to enhance managerial innovativeness. Our findings found partial support for the idea that actions are needed to actualize potential resources embedded in social networks, as centrally positioned managers enjoy higher innovativeness when they engage in ambassador activities. We also found that advice network sparseness and advice network centrality had independent, not interactive relationships with managerial innovativeness, suggesting that they offer distinct routes to achieving managerial innovativeness. Overall, our research clarifies the relationships of two important social network attributes on managerial innovativeness, and also sheds new light on how managerial action matters in realizing social network advantages for innovative ends.
When organizations face paradoxical tensions, such as when they must simultaneously meet scientific and commercial objectives, individuals within the organization also experience tensions. How individuals’ responses to these tensions inform the collective organizational response remains a theoretical and empirical challenge. We address this challenge by introducing a social network perspective. In a two-stage mixed-method study of a research institute in Taiwan, we examined how individuals’ social networks facilitated the organization’s response to a science-commerce paradox. Our results demonstrated that the level of heterogeneity in each individual’s social network influenced how each individual contributed to the organization’s collective response. Specifically, individuals with heterogeneous instrumental networks were more likely to contribute to the organization-wide consensus response, whereas individuals with homogeneous expressive networks were more likely to contribute to a polarized subgroup response. Our findings suggest that individuals’ roles in shaping a collective organizational response to paradoxes depends on who they seek advice from and who they befriend.
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