Power, Social Influence, and Sense Making: Effects of Network Centrality and Proximity on Employee Perceptions.

Funding for this study was generously supplied by the Organizational Behavior Department of Yale University and the Harvard Business School Division of Research. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Sunbelt International Social Network Conference, San Diego, 1990 and the Academy of Management Annual Meetings, Miami, 1991. The authors are grateful to Paul DiMaggio, David Krackhardt, Peter Marsden, and Ron Rice for helpful suggestions. We also profited greatly from comments provided by Marshall Meyer and this journal's reviewers. This paper explores the hypothesis that network interaction patterns affect employee perceptions through two conceptually and empirically distinguishable mechanisms: localized social influence based on network proximity and systemic power based on network centrality. The study explores the relative contributions of individual attributes, formal organizational positions, network centrality, and network proximity in explaining individual variation in perceptions of work-related conditions in an advertising firm. Results suggest that network factors shape job-related perceptions, over and above the effects of individual attributes and formal positions. Both advice network centrality and friendship network proximity evidenced significant effects, although they were stronger for centrality than for proximity.'