Enabling Knowledge Flows in Organizations
My research focuses on the intersection of social capital and information flows in organizations. The interest emerged from an observation that structural constraint, while important, was only one form of constraint within networks. More specifically, I hypothesized that cognitive constraints may impact the performance of actors with abundant social capital. With Ranjay Gulati, I began a research program which explored how firms enable “spill-ins” (or serendipitously transfer knowledge) within firms. We conducted research in four organizations, exploring how they replicate reliability and validity of knowledge created in one geography to different units both within and across boundaries. This research published in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal in 2010 describes building blocks of inferential learning within firms. In a related research project, we explore the factors that constrain knowledge using unique email data, social network data and performance data to explore the effects of information flow, controlling for structure, on performance. This working paper, finds that properties of knowledge flow such as volume, variance and non-unique information significantly impact the performance of organizational actors above and beyond their social capital within the firm.:
Speed in Customer Response
Another important constraint in organizations is how they respond to customer driven querries. In research published in the Harvard Business Review. We show that firms who develop a capability to respond quickly to their online leads are much more likely to contact, qualify and close deals. However, building this capability is no small endevor.
Too Much Social Capital?
I have expanded these ideas, building a theoretical framework with Shad Morris in a recently accepted article forthcoming in the Academy of Management Review. In this paper, we highlight that star employees are likely to be embedded in a virtuous cycle of social capital development: their high performance and high visibility are likely to lead to abundant social capital and further high performance and visibility. However, due to the cognitive limitation of these actors, exponential levels of information flow are likely to lead to their fall from stardom unless carefully managed. With Professor Morris, I am currently collecting data from the World Bank as well as multinational firms operating the US, India, Ireland, China and Malaysia to test and elaborate on our theoretical model.
The Temporal Effects of Social Sanctions?
In research I am conducting with John Bingham and Joel Evans, I explore the impact of social capital and embeddedness in an international context. Theories of embeddedness posit that in highly embedded networks actors’ non-normative actions are controlled by the ease of monitoring violations and social sanctions that are levied on violating actors. In this research, we find that actors who violate norms are ostracized in network; however, the performance effects of social sanctions are temporary, particularly for foreign actors who learn to operate outside of social norms and the social sanctions of the network. An important implication of this work is the identification of a boundary condition for embeddedness and social capital theories. The effectiveness of social sanctions is not universal for all actors within the network, particularly when sanctions cross national boundaries.