The authors use social network analysis to understand how employees’ propensity to engage in positive and negative gossip is driven by their underlying relationship ties.They find that expressive friendship ties between employees are positively related to engaging in both positive and negative gossip, whereas instrumental workflow ties, which are less trusting than friendship ties, are related solely with positive gossip. The authors also find that structural embeddedness in the friendship network further increases the chance that the pair will engage in negative gossip. Finally, an employee’s total gossiping activity (both positive and negative) is negatively related to supervisors’ evaluations of the employee’s performance, whereas total gossip activity is positively related to peers’ evaluations of the employee’s informal influence.

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.

As social network theory and methodology advance, scholars in multiple fields have increasingly become interested in examining work teams using network perspectives. Social networks not only enabled work team researchers to theorize about interdependencies and the dynamic interplay of team components (i.e., individuals, dyads, and whole teams) but also provided a methodological tool kit with which to operationalize and test hypotheses about such interdependencies. To this end, the purpose of this article is to conduct an integrative review of organizational teams research that has adopted a social network perspective to highlight what is known and what remains to be addressed. We then outline an agenda for future research that introduces three promising areas to guide researchers to move the field forward. We conclude that a more thorough integration of the networks and teams literatures offer great promise for advancing both our science and practice.

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

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