查看文章

Organizations contain multiple social foci—settings for interaction providing members with occasions for structuring their social relations. In this paper we examine how identification with particular social foci within organizations influences the propensity of advice-seeking ties to crosscut the boundaries of organizational subunits. We propose and test a theory of relationship formation based on the strength of organizational members’ identification with social foci. We expect that advice relations of organizational members identifying more strongly with local foci (organizational subunits) will be more likely to be contained within their boundaries. By contrast, we expect that advice relations of organizational members identifying more strongly with a global focus (the organization as a whole) will be more likely to crosscut the boundaries defined around local foci. We test these hypotheses on data we collected on advice …