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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, ((c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).)

Employee radical creativity critically depends on substantive informational resources from others across the wider organization. We propose that the social network ties of employees' immediate leaders assume a central role in garnering these resources, thereby fostering their employees' radical creativity both independent of and interactively with employees' own network ties. Drawing on data from 214 employees working in 30 teams of a public technology and environmental services organization, we find that team leaders' betweenness centrality in the idea network within their teams as well as among their peer leaders provides creative benefits beyond employees' own internal and external ties. Further, employees' and leaders' ties within and external to the team interactively predict employee radical creativity. Implications for theory and practice are discussed., (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.)

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., ((c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.)

Using role theory as the overarching framework, we propose that employees' voice has contrasting relationships with the traits of duty orientation, or employees' dispositional sense of moral and ethical obligation at the workplace, and achievement orientation, or the extent of their ingrained personal ambition to get ahead professionally. Using data from 262 employees and their managers, we demonstrate that duty and achievement orientations are, respectively, positively and negatively related to voice through their impact on voice role conceptualization or the extent to which employees consider voice as part of their personal responsibility at work. Further, we delineate how employees' beliefs about their efficacy to engage in voice and judgments about psychological safety in the organization can moderate these relationships. We discuss the implications of these findings for theory and practice., ((c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved.)

We examined the proposition that employees' work-flow centrality (i.e., the extent to which they are critical to the task-related interaction networks of their work groups) enhances their personal influence within their work groups and, therefore, motivates them to engage in voice behaviors. In support of this proposition, in a study of 184 bank employees nested within 42 work groups, we found that employees' work-flow centrality was positively related to voice behaviors, with their personal influence mediating this relationship. Further, work-flow centrality was more strongly related to personal influence when employees had higher task performance, and personal influence was more strongly related to voice behaviors when employees had higher levels of work-group identification. Implications for theory and practice are discussed., (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved.)