The friendship network as a decision-making resource: Dispositional moderators of social influences on organizational choice.

TLDR: The authors found that personality types hypothesized to differ in their preferences for social comparison information did differ significantly both with respect to how much their decision patterns resembled those of their friends and with the criteria they used in the decision-making process.

Abstract: The patterns of interview choices of 170 Masters of Business Administration students were tracked unobtrusively over 5 months. Two personality variables, self-monitoring (SM) and social uniqueness, were used to partition the sample. The results confirmed that personality types hypothesized to differ in their preferences for social comparison information did differ significantly both with respect to how much their decision patterns resembled those of their friends and with respect to the criteria they used in the decision-making process. In contrast to recent critiques of the SM construct, the research provides evidence in support of an SM typology assessed by a unitary factor underlying responses to the Self-Monitoring Scale. In general, the results suggest that the social network, as a decision-making resource, may be as much an expression of personality as it is a constraint on individual choice. When individuals make decisions they are often influenced by what other people like themselves are saying and doing. This basic insight is crucial to the burgeoning literature on social networks that uses Festinger's (1954) social comparison theory as a starting point for sophisticated field studies of social influence processes (e.g., Burt, 1987; see Gartrell, 1987, for a review). The social network approach differs from traditional approaches in psychology in that it focuses on relations between people, rather than on attributes of people. For example, it measures the existence of friendship ties between individuals, rather than the friendliness of each individual (e.g., Krackhardt & Porter, 1985). The network approach can test whether the pattern of such ties in a particular social world is related to other important patterns, such as the pattern of similarity in cognitive perceptions (e.g., Krackhardt & Kilduff, 1990). Recently, network research has contributed many new insights concerning how structural relations affect important outcomes (e.g., Brass, 1981; Burt, 1987; Kilduff, 1990; Krackhardt & Porter, 1986; see Knoke & Kuklinski, 1982, for an excellent