Papers and other writing

Revisiting extraversion and leadership emergence: A social network churn perspective

with Jon Jachimowicz, Dan Wang, and Robert Krause

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.

How employees react to unsolicited and solicited advice in the workplace: Implications for using advice, learning, and performance

with Colin Fisher and Jochen Menges

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.

Relational misperceptions in the workplace: New frontiers and challenges

with Kris Byron

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.

Personality change: Implications for organizational behavior

with Stefano Tasselli and Martin Kilduff

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.

The paradox of agency: Feeling powerful reduces brokerage opportunity recognition yet increases willingness to broker

with Martin Kilduff, Jochen Menges, and Gavin Kilduff

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.

Personality, income, and compensatory consumption: Low-income extraverts spend more on status

with Joe Gladstone

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.

Personality and social networks in organizations: A review and future directions

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.

Integrating personality and social networks: A meta-analysis of personality, network position, and work outcomes in organizations

with Ruolian Fang, Zhen Zhang, Marc Anderson, Jason Shaw, and Martin Kilduff (Ruolian Fang and I contributed equally)

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.

The complicated life of extraverts as informal leaders

with Jon Jachimowicz, Dan Wang, Robert Krause, and Julian Arango

Society for Personality and Social Psychology: Character & Context

A piece about what our network churn research means for extraverted leaders.

Reactions to unsolicited advice in the workplace

with Colin Fisher

Society for Personality and Social Psychology: Character & Context

An account of our research on how coworkers respond to advice they did not ask for.

Becoming more conscientious

with Stefano Tasselli and Martin Kilduff

Harvard Business Review

What the science of personality change means for people who want to become more conscientious at work.

Metabolic basis to Sherpa altitude adaptation

with James Horscroft, Andrew Murray, and 21 others

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.

Review of Neighbor Networks: Competitive Advantage Local and Personal, by Ronald S. Burt

with Martin Kilduff

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.

Individual factors: Personality and motivation

with Robert Tett, J. Hopper, and B. Swaim

A Handbook of the Psychology of Intelligence Analysis

Book chapter in a handbook edited by R. L. Rees.