Culture, Cognition, and Collaborative Networks in Organizations

Abstract

This paper examines the interplay of culture, cognition, and social networks in organizations with norms that emphasize cross-boundary collaboration. In such settings, social desirability concerns can induce a disparity between how people view themselves in conscious (deliberative) and less conscious (automatic) cognition. These differences have implications for the resulting pattern of intra-organizational collaborative ties. Based on a laboratory study and field data from a biotechnology firm, the authors find that: (a) people consciously reported more positive views of themselves as collaborative actors than they appeared to hold in less conscious cognition; (b) less conscious collaborative-independent self-views were associated with the choice to enlist organizationally distant colleagues in collaboration; and (c) these self-views were also associated with a person's likelihood of being successfully enlisted by organizationally distant colleagues (i.e., of supporting these colleagues in collaboration). By contrast, consciously reported collaborative-independent self-views were not associated with these choices. The study contributes to our understanding of how culture is internalized in individual cognition and how self-related cognition is linked to social structure through collaboration choices. It also demonstrates the limits of self-reports in settings with strong normative pressures and represents a novel integration of methods from cognitive psychology and network analysis.

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Seeing Social Structure: Assessing the Accuracy of Interpersonal Judgments About Social Networks

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