The
Management Department
Department
Seminar Series
Tiziana casciaro
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
Tuesday,
June 26th
2018
Room N231
at 10:00 am
(4.00
p.m
in
Singapore)
Theme: “How
do people perceive organizational networks? Toward a theory of Gestalt versus
elemental network perception”
Abstract: “How people perceive organizational
networks influences individual and organizational outcomes above and beyond the
effects of the network structure underlying those perceptions. In investigating
these effects, research on network perception has been dominated by an
elemental view of social cognition, which assumes that people encode and recall
each tie in the network, and construct their view of the network as a whole
based on the sum of these ties. This
dominant view has marginalized a Gestalt, holistic view of network perception,
whereby people perceptions of an actor’s network position (i.e., central vs
peripheral, high status vs. low status, liked vs. disliked) are created through
a top-down, category-driven process that hinges heavily on their organized
prior knowledge, as opposed to relying primarily on bottom-up, data-driven
processes. I argue and document empirically that recognizing the distinction
between elemental and Gestalt forms of network perception allows a greater
understanding of the descriptive (how people do perceive networks) and
prescriptive (how people should perceive networks) implications of network
perception for organizational behavior. I then set the conceptual foundations
for a theory that encourages a distinction between thin structure and deep
structure as boundary conditions for the relevance of elemental and Gestalt
network perceptions. Elemental network cognition, I propose, is necessary to
capture the effects of deep structural features of the network—the complex
topology of network edges. Gestalt network perceptions may suffice instead when
a phenomenon can be understood in terms of its thin structural
features—higher-level aggregates and trends of social connections. Working
toward such a theory can direct future studies toward a fuller account of the
way people form network perceptions, the boundary conditions for the impact of
those perceptions on organizational phenomena, and the methodological options
that such descriptive and prescriptive theorizing opens up for research on
organizational networks.
