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Research of workplace envy demonstrates destructive behavioral consequences, as well as, productive ones. We propose that this ambiguity may be attributable to differences in individuals' social contexts. Specifically, people tend to rely heavily on comparisons with a stable group of social referents that inform their organizational behaviors. Variations in the structure of people's reference groups--in size or density--might influence their reactions to comparisons, since structural characteristics of social networks have been shown to affect how people access and respond to information. In a centralized administrative unit of a large health care organization (N=105), we find employees with larger and less dense reference groups are more likely to experience benign envy, feeling that a desired outcome is attainable and that the envied other reached their higher status fairly and justly, which is associated with greater performance effort. Conversely employees with smaller and denser reference groups are more likely to experience malicious envy, feeling that outcomes are unattainable or that that the envied other reached their vaunted status unfairly, which leads to deviant behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine whether job performance may be a function of one's colleagues' positions in workplace networks and organizational units. We propose that this "secondhand" social capital creates value for an individual when it offers both novel knowledge spillovers and enough cooperation to allow access to and understanding of that knowledge. To date, research of secondhand social capital has yielded mixed results, perhaps because the focus has been on brokerage in the colleagues' networks (i.e., novelty), discounting the effects of cooperation. In a study of 1,273 engineers across 16 business units, we find ties that span business units and include secondhand closure (where the contacts are each embedded in a constrained, dense network) can benefit one's own performance. Bridging the organizational boundary provides the novelty; and secondhand closure, the cooperation, as evidenced by our mediation analysis. We detected no effect for secondhand closure with contacts in the same business unit--where cooperation is likely to be more prevalent anyway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Involvement in workplace networks generates career advantages. The explanations for why people develop or dissolve these valuable relationships tend to center around interaction tendencies, due to proximity, homophily, or reciprocity, for example. Alternatively, people may purposively change their network ties in an effort to improve their work experiences, as indicated by job crafting theory. Specifically, work pace pressures and emotional demands have been shown to produce stress and strain. People may respond to these job demands by turning toward or away from their coworkers, affecting their access to valuable resources. We study whether and how people craft their work-focused and socially-focused workplace networks in response to job demands in an R&D department of a large Scandinavian bio-technology company, through three waves of data collected over eighteen months. Our results indicate that people faced with a high pace of work tend to shrink, or reduce the size of their socially-focused and work-focused networks, even after accounting for alternative explanations for network change. In contrast, people who perceive high emotional demands tend to build, or increase the size of their socially-focused networks. This work merges theories of organizational networks, job crafting and job demands-resources to provide an agent-driven explanation for network change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]