Disentangling the Influences of Leaders' Relational Embeddedness on Interorganizational Exchange

Abstract

Drawing on the concept of relational embeddedness and the associated mechanisms of mutual understanding, trust, and commitment, we examine how leaders' prior exchange experiences influence the likelihood of subsequent interorganizational exchange. We begin to develop a microlevel model of organization-level relations that accounts for nodal multiplexity. In data on baseball player trades, we found that individual leaders' ties affected exchanges less than did an organization's other ties. The sharing of exchange experiences by organizations and their current leaders increased the influences of those experiences on exchange behavior. Thus, leaders have more influence within their organizational contexts than in isolation.

Contacts and Contracts: Cross-Level Network Dynamics in the Development of an Aircraft Material

“…The embeddedness of organizations depends on ties at the level of individuals (Barden andMitchell 2007, Granovetter 1985). Ties at the level of organizations operate through individuals and their connections with counterparts in partner organizations (Seabright et al 1992), thus creating multiple levels of embeddedness (cf.…”

The Temptation of Social Ties: When Interpersonal Network Transactions Hurt Firm Performance

“…While our primary objective was to construct a conservative measure for social ties, we are unable to analyze the interrelation between different levels of organizational and managerial social capital. Barden and Mitchell (2007), for example, combined interleader ties and organization-level ties in their analysis of interorganizatonal exchange and found that the influence of shared exchange experience between the leaders of two organizations on interorganizational exchange was larger, when other members of the organizations also shared a history of exchange experiences. The authors thus concluded that "leaders have more influence within their organizational context than in isolation" (p. 1440).…”

“…For example, Barden and Mitchell (2007) infer the degree of a firm's social embeddedness from its previous transactions with other firms, and from previous transactions between its manager and other managers. Therefore, their definition reflects the joint history between the involved parties.…”

“…Decision makers tend to restrict their searches for alternatives based on incurred individual search costs (Barden & Mitchell, 2007). To reduce personal workload, decision makers have often been observed to engage in prechoice screening, which reduces the number of choice alternatives to be evaluated in the decision process (Beach, 1993).…”

“…Our choice to test our hypotheses with data from the NBA was motivated by the observation that the use of sports data for empirical research on organizational topics offers a number of considerable advantages, and that it is now a well established procedure in the literature (Berman, Down, & Hill, 2002;Barden & Mitchell, 2007).…”