On Getting Along and Getting Ahead: How Personality Affects Social Network Dynamics

How people get along and get ahead socially within the organizations?  This dissertation looks into how personality and interpersonal perceptions contribute to social network dynamics. It presents two studies that advance our understanding on how friendship unfolds within the organizations. The first study looks into how proactive personality - individuals’ tendency to change their environment - influences perceptions of competence and friendship in teams. The second study looks into how Five Factor personality traits add to dynamics in friendship and conflict networks and looks into how friendship and conflict mutually influence each other.

Both studies aim at three key contributions to organization studies. First, they specify processes and mechanisms through which personality affects social network dynamics, thus responding to calls to study how individual actions shape social structures. Second, both studies address how two types of networks mutually influence each other (perceptions of competence and friendship, Chapter 2; friendship and conflict, Chapter 3), shedding light on how multiplex networks evolve. Finally, this dissertation aims to distinguish various forces shaping network formation (e.g. separate structural influences from individual actions) by applying stochastic actor-based modeling of social network dynamics.