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The Influence of Inclusion in Influential Networks: Perceptions of
 Ability and Personality Traits on Promotions Within Management
Gita De Souza
Penn State University

 ABSTRACT

Promotions rank among some of the most powerful forms of incentive and reward systems that organizations can offer their employees.  This study examined the influence of inclusion in influential networks, perceptions of managerial ability and the personality traits of extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability and openness to experience on the number of promotions awarded to managers.  However, results from a field survey showed that inclusion in influential organizational networks, perceptions of managerial ability and the personality trait of introversion were significantly related to the number of promotions gained within management.  Implications of the findings are discussed in terms of individual differences, trust and distrust, and team dynamics in organizations that are viewed as social systems.

Promotions are an important organizational career and hierarchical progression mechanism. They have been formally defined as upward movements in organizational hierarchies (Sanborn & Berger, 1990).  Only a select few of those who begin their careers in organizations and a select few of those recruited at non-entry career stages are eventually promoted into the upper echelons of management.  They rank among some of the most powerful incentives that any organization can offer its employees (Markham, Harlan & Hackett, 1987; Sanborn & Berger, 1990) and are usually accompanied by one or more increments in pay, benefits, organizational centrality, status, perquisites and future opportunity (Sanborn & Berger, 1990).  In this study, three research questions surrounding managerial promotions were specifically addressed.  They are:
    (i)                          do individuals included in influential networks receive more promotions?
    (ii)                         do perceptions of managerial ability influence the number of promotions awarded?
    (iii)                       do personality traits have any impact on promotion decisions in organizations? 

These research questions were studied only on a sample of managers across several organizations.  Managers were studied because they are generally accorded more responsibility and decision making power, and because they constitute an important resource for maintaining organizations' competitive advantage by providing them with strategic and tactical direction.

Prior research

The topic of managerial progression in organizations has been researched before.  "How do you make it to the top?" Tharenou, Latimer and Conroy (1994) posed in their paper on managerial advancement.  Tharenou et al's findings suggest that training, career encouragement, work experience, and the presence of help at home seemed to determine which managers advanced in the public and private sectors in Australian organizations.  A U.S. study conducted by Ohlott, Ruderman and McCauley (1994) at the Center for Creative Leadership hints that task-related developmental components of current jobs actively shape the careers of those promoted into senior management positions.  This relationship holds true if and only if task-related developmental challenges, and obstacles of the type described below, are minimized, and if trust is maximized in organizations. 

The presence of a significant amount of trust between managers and their supervisors, and between managers and others in the organization, is vital for their career development.  Coleman (1990) studied trust among diamond traders in London and New York. He detected that traders make or break deals on the basis of verbal agreements as a demonstration of trust.  A large part of such deal-making was found to be contingent upon the community's or influential organizational networks' dissemination of information. This information included the trader's reputation known to those with whom he or she does business or must do business with in the future.  When studying promotion decisions in organizations, it is important to pay attention to organizational networks, their patterns of inclusion and exclusion, their perceptions, and their patterns of information dissemination against the backdrop of trust between

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its members.  Organizational actions that speak to inclusion and integration, and good transmissions and communications between members, can help further the case for individual promotion, while exclusionary or devious actions and the transmission of bad or false reports can harm the individual case for promotion with varying degrees of severity.  Kelley and Thibaut (1978) called such leverage "fate control," because the community and its constituents can unilaterally and singularly determine the fate of each of its members.

The studies recounted in this section accentuate the organizational and individual influences on promotions and the antecedents of promotions in organizations.  An organizational perspective proposed by Blum, Fields and Goodman (1994) examined a few contextual aspects surrounding managerial advancement.  Blum et al.’s results indicate that macro-characteristics such as existing social structures, personnel and compensation practices and industry type exert a significant influence on managerial job placement practices. 

Individual differences also appear to play a role.  Powell and Butterfield (1994; 1997) specifically studied the effect of the demographic variable, race, on promotions to top management positions within the federal government.  They concluded that race affects promotion decisions indirectly through two other job-relevant variables, namely, employment in the hiring department and years of work experience.   In other words, their study suggests that applicants of color or racial minorities might end up at a disadvantage in the promotion process due to the indirect effects arising from variables such as lack of seniority and tenure (1997).  Another study from the international arena (Israel) suggests that labor unions afford their members some protection in promotion decisions as a result of which women face lowered rates of promotion and compensation discrimination in unionized firms (Bamberger, Admati-Dvir & Harel, 1995).   However, such union-based protection is mostly available only to non-managerial personnel groups (groups that were not the focus of this research).

The research presented here specifically examines the variables that influence managerial promotions and advancement in organizations.

The Hypotheses

Several variables influence organizational promotion decisions.  The three variables that are studied here are the extent of inclusion in influential networks, perceptions of ability, and personality traits.

Inclusion in Influential Networks

Networks are critical to both career advancement and individual socialization in organizations (Noe, 1988).  Limited access to networks or exclusion from organizational networks is a disadvantage, because it affords individuals "restricted knowledge of what is going on in their organizations and difficulty in forming alliances, which, in turn, are associated with limited mobility and glass ceiling effects" (Ibarra, 1993, p. 56). 

Access to influential networks in organizations is important.  As Ibarra (1993) highlighted, in order to get things accomplished in organizations, individuals should be able to draw on both instrumental and emotional resources from these networks.  Examples of instrumental resources include seeking and gaining work-related information while emotional resources include bonding with others through the building of alliances.

Blau (1977) proposed that individuals tend to interact with similar individuals while bonding and networking.  This proposition, the basis of the concept of "homophily," leads us to the idea that preference for others who are similar to ourselves on dimensions such as age, race or sex result in social networks that are predominantly comprised of individuals who share common characteristics (Brass, 1985). 

In addition to homophily, other dimensions can also influence social network formation and representation.  Mehra, Kilduff & Brass (1998) used McGuire’s Distinctiveness Theory (1984) to study social network representation further.  Distinctiveness Theory parsimoniously enhances the concept of "homophily," when it suggests that people in a social context tend to identify with others with whom they share characteristics that are relatively rare in that environment.  Thus, two or more minority immigrant managers in a group that primarily consists of Caucasian managers are more likely to notice and to identify with each other because of their distinctiveness.  Mehra et al. discovered that relative proportional representation plays a role in defining distinctiveness.  In other

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words, the lower the relative proportion of members sharing some characteristics in a social context, the greater the likelihood of those members establishing social network ties with each other.  Mehra et al.'s study focused on distinctiveness based on race and sex in a sample of MBA students.  This paper hones in on distinctiveness that is based on mutual attraction and interests, and the willingness to identify with individuals displaying good potential or good track records within management networks.  In so doing, it subscribes to the concept of deep-level diversity that encompasses mutual attraction and interests, job satisfaction and organizational commitment that transcend surface diversity characteristics such as race and sex (see Harrison, Price & Bell, 1998).

Inclusion in organizational dominant networks has been found to be an important correlate of individual perceived power and promotion in organizations (Brass, 1984).  Exclusion from such networks is unfortunate and acts as a career hindering mechanism for some individuals. Brass (1985) investigated:

    i)                   the interaction patterns of men and women in an organization
    (ii)                 the relationship of those patterns to their perceptions of influence, and
    (iii)                the relationship to their promotions to supervisory positions after three years. 

His results suggest that positions in workflow and interaction networks relate strongly to measures of influence in organizations.  His follow-up study further stated that promotions were significantly related to centrality within the functional area, as well as in men's and dominant coalition interaction networks.  The first hypothesis will attempt to replicate and extend Brass's findings by studying a sample of managers.

HI:  The organization is more likely to promote those individuals who associate with the members of the organization's dominant influential network within management for purposes of career and/or friendship.

Perceptions of Ability

Ability is widely recognized as a criterion of evaluation in promotion decisions (Markham, Harlan & Hackett, 1987).  Ability represents what an individual can do.  Quinn, Tabor and Gordon (1968) surveyed managers in three Ohio firms and found that 47% of the respondents mentioned ability frequently when discussing how they generated promotions.  Individual ability has previously been evaluated in a number of ways.  Education, generally the attainment of a college degree (London & Stumpf, 1983), supervisor evaluations (London & Stumpf, 1982) and peer evaluations (Markham, Harlan & Hackett, 1987) are some of the means that have been used to assess individual ability in the past.

Blumberg and Pringle (1982) made a strong argument for the importance of ability's impact on work performance.  Since different jobs and professions make different demands on people's abilities, a good fit between the abilities of an individual and the job or profession usually results in good performance.  Managers need to possess good decision-making abilities (the ability to identify problems, generate alternatives, evaluate those alternatives and make competent choices), good work-related abilities and good interpersonal abilities (good listening, feedback and conflict resolution skills) in order to perform well.  Stevens and Campion (1994) referred to these abilities as technical expertise (job or professional expertise), problem solving and decision-making skills and interpersonal skills.

The term "Pygmalion Effect" (Eden, 1990) has been used to characterize situations in which supervisors' expectations and assessments of their employees' abilities actually shape or determine their employees' behavior.  In other words, if supervisors in organizations expect more from their employees, their employees are likely to perform better.  In a study conducted with 105 soldiers engaged in a combat command course in the Israeli military, Eden & Shani (1982) found the Pygmalion Effect to be very

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much in existence there.  Groups of trainees were randomly assigned to the defense force training instructors who were part of the study.  The researchers observed that the instructors who were told that their trainees had high potential saw that their trainees scored significantly higher on tests, were more positive, and liked their leaders more than the groups of trainees who were designated as being of normal or unknown potential.  In short, the trainees who were perceived as possessing high potential demonstrated better results on the whole.

The "Pygmalion Effect" illustrates the power of perception described above (see Eden, 1990).  Perception has been characterized as a sense-making process.  As the results of the Eden and Shani study suggest, perception is a sensory process of interpretation and projection.  While supervisor perceptions have been found to influence their employees' performance, prior research was unavailable for citation on whether their perceptions also influence the numbers and types of promotions that they award their employees.  So this study attempted to discover the relationship between perceptions of ability and the number of promotions gained within management.  Hypothesis 2 proposes that perceptions of the individual manager's ability will positive relate to the organization's decision to promote that manager.

H2: Positive perceptions of the manager's ability will positive relate to the organization's decision to promote that manager.

Personality traits

How do personality traits influence success on the job, if success is measured in terms of the number of promotions gained?  Prior research has been surprisingly mute on this topic, although McClelland and Boyatzis (1982) studied a sample of AT&T managers and determined that personality characteristics, such as need for power and activity inhibition, predicted promotion patterns sixteen years later.

Personality traits have often been measured as the "Big Five" factors (McCrae & Costa, 1987).  Digman and Shmelyov (1996) suggest that the "Big Five" model may be a universal model that is appropriate for the interpretation of personality across cultures and linguistic frames of reference.  Barrick and Mount's (1991) meta-analytic investigation on the "Big Five" personality traits looked at the relationships between the personality dimensions (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness to experience) and three job performance criteria (job proficiency, training proficiency and personnel data) for five occupational groups.  The groups consisted of business professionals, police, managers, salespeople and skilled/semi-skilled employees.  The results of the meta-analysis showed that conscientiousness showed consistent relations with all job performance criteria across all the occupational groups studied.  For the remaining dimensions, results varied by occupational group and criterion type.  For example, extraversion was found to be a valid predictor for managers and salespeople in all three performance criteria.  Noteworthy in this finding is the fact that both occupations (management and sales) require social interaction dynamics.  Extraversion and openness to experience were found to be valid predictors of the training proficiency criterion across organizations, but contrary to predictions, emotional stability was not found to be a valid predictor of any performance criterion.

Another meta-analysis (Ones, Visweswaran & Schmidt, 1993) discovered that personality-based integrity tests were related to job performance.  Hogan and Ones (1997) went on to suggest that since personality-based integrity tests have been related to the "Big Five" traits of conscientiousness, agreeableness and emotional stability, that there also exists a strong relationship between broad personality measures and job performance.  While their proposal and findings extend the scope of our knowledge on personality effects, at this point in time little is known about the influence of personality traits on measures of career success, such as promotions, a gap that this research will address.

Organizations can benefit if they link the study of personality with the demands of jobs or positions.  The greater the degree of fit between personality and the demands of the job or position, the better the manager's performance.  Chatman, Caldwell & O'Reilly (1999) developed an ideal personality template to determine the degree of managerial fit between an individual and that individual's degree of career success in non-promotion terms.  By utilizing a semi-idiographic approach within a longitudinal

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framework, Chatman et al. were able to determine the extent to which the sample of MBA students would be successful based on the salaries earned, their full-time/part-time work status and their job-change histories.  The traits on the managerial template that scored highest on a nine point scale depicting the success criteria were: being productive, the ability to see to the heart of problems, high aspirations, dependability and responsibility, ethicality, assertiveness, verbal fluency, straightforwardness and forthrightness, high intellectual capacity, and social and personal perceptiveness.

While personality traits can be measured with many scientific instruments, the most widely accepted personality trait measurement system involves the use of the "Big Five" traits to broadly summarize the domain of individual personality.  Hypothesis 3a suggests that organizations are more likely to promote individuals who demonstrate high scores on characteristics such as extraversion and conscientiousness within management.  By way of support for this hypothesis, extraverted managers have been found to perform their jobs better while conscientious employees have been found to perform their jobs better across all occupational groups (see Barrick & Mount, 1991).  While building upon these findings from previous research, this study theorized that since extraverted managers perform their jobs better and since better job performers are usually rewarded with promotions (Markham, Harlan & Hackett, 1987), extraverted managers should also be rewarded with promotions (H3a).  In a similar vein, it was also theorized that conscientious managers would receive promotions (H3a).  As there is no definitive prior research to suggest that the traits of agreeableness, emotional stability and openness to experience are either linked with job performance or with promotions, H3b represents a null hypothesis.  In other words, the traits of agreeableness, emotional stability and openness to experience are expected to have no significant influence on the number of managerial promotions gained.

H3a:  Organizations are more likely to promote those individuals who demonstrate high scores on traits such as extraversion and conscientiousness within management.

H3b: The traits of agreeableness, emotional stability and openness to experience have no significant influence on the number of promotions gained in organizations.

Method

Design

This research was designed to obtain data on factors that influence managerial promotion decisions.  Field data were collected from male and female managers from several different organizations.  Target participant lists were purchased from a professional association that organizes professional enhancement seminars for corporate managers.  The target participants were randomly selected from the management cadre, and from various organizations geographically dispersed across all fifty states in the U.S.  They were selected from the public, private and service sectors.  A survey questionnaire was specifically designed to measure the variables identified here and mailed to each target participant (See Appendix A).  A follow-up reminder postcard was mailed to each target participant three weeks later in order to ensure an adequate response rate (see Dillman, 1978 for a review on mail survey procedures).

Of the managers to whom questionnaires were mailed, 325 (50%) were sent to female managers.  Of the 650 mailed questionnaires, 186 were returned by the respondents.  Of these, 2 managers declined to answer and returned blank survey instruments while 1 survey contained several missing responses.  Of the original 650 mailed questionnaires, 183 were thus retained for the purpose of the study.  The effective response rate to the present study after the reminder post-card was mailed was 29%.  (See Table 1 for survey respondent descriptives.)

Of the studied population, 40% of the respondents belonged to organizations that were international in scope of operations, 28% to regional operations, 19% to national and 12% to local organizations.

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The mean age of the sample was 43 years, with a minimum of 24 years and a maximum of 63 years.  As for education, 53% of the respondents had a bachelor's degree and 23% had a master's degree.  The median annual salary lay in the range from $60,000 to $80,000 with the modal annual salary lying somewhere in the range between $40,000 and $60,000.  The tallied results showed that 91.5% of the respondents were white.

Of the managers surveyed, 70% had received at least one promotion within management in the current organization in which they held membership.  The number of promotions awarded did not differ significantly by respondent gender (t(180)=1.57, p=.12).  96.7% of the respondents received promotions ranging between 0 and 5.  Only 6 of the 182 respondents received between 5 and a maximum of 8 promotions.

The mean tenure in the respective organizations was 12.25 years for the whole sample, 14.33 years for the males and 9.92 years for the females.  The average time that respondents held their present managerial positions was 3.92 years for the whole sample, 4.75 years for males and 3 years for females.

The Measures

The measures used to study the antecedent variables of inclusion in influential networks, perceptions of ability and personality traits are presented in full in Table 6 at the end of this paper.

Inclusion in Influential Networks

In this study, the extent of inclusion in influential organizational networks had been proposed to influence managerial promotions.  Following Brass (1985), each focal respondent's relationship to the dominant organizational coalition was assessed on the basis of the following dimensions: career and friendship.  The measure that was used to evaluate this variable followed the sociometric approach outlined by Duchon, Green and Taber (1986).  It queried, "Excluding yourself, think about the small group of top-level management personnel who are the most influential members of your organization.  Refer to these executives as person A, person B, person C, person D, person E and person F respectively.  For each of these identified members, please indicate whether you consider yourself to be their close associate for purposes of career and/or friendship.  In other words, are you part of these members’ "inner circle."  Circle "1" for "yes" if you are part of the member's "inner circle."  Circle "2" if you are not.

Perceptions of Ability

An inventory was compiled to assess organizational perceptions of individual managerial ability, the second proposed influence on managerial promotions.  Specifically, the organization's evaluations of each manager's decision making, interpersonal and work-related abilities were measured.  No instruments were found available to measure this construct.  Hence, perceptions of managerial ability were measured with a six item measure created for this study.  The items included: "The organization that I work for thinks very highly of my decision making skills;” and "My supervisors at work believe strongly in my capabilities." The items were indexed on a seven point Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree).  Reliability estimates (Cronbach's alpha=.86) for this measure indicated that the measure was highly reliable.

Personality Traits

Personality traits, the individual difference influences, were measured based on the five factor personality model.  Although the personality structure itself has been found in many different test formats, no single standard measure of the five factors is available (McCrae & Costa, 1985).  The five traits include extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and culture.  The trait ratings used to measure each of the five factors in this study were based on Norman's (1960) 20 item bipolar scale.  This is the shortest available measure of personality traits, and parsimony was a significant criterion for its inclusion in the survey instrument designed.

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This study replicated Watson's (1989) modification of Norman's (1960) personality scale as reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, via the use of a simple five point rating format.  The reliability estimates, though low in some cases, were similar to those obtained by Watson.  For each of the five trait measures, the reliability estimates (Cronbach's alpha) were found to be as follows: extraversion, .67; agreeableness, .51; conscientiousness, .40; emotional stability, .74; and culture, .54.  The reliability estimates reported in Watson's study by individuals who self-assessed were as follows:  extraversion estimate, .67; agreeableness estimate, .48; conscientiousness estimate, .45; emotional stability estimate, .54; and openness to experience estimate, .49.

Promotions Received

All respondents held management positions at the time the questionnaire was mailed.  Only the number of managerial promotions that had been awarded to the respondents' in the current organization were of interest to this study because ostensive barriers that happen to restrict mobility are generally specific to each organization.

Participants were asked, "Have you ever been promoted within management in your current organization (yes/no)?"  If they responded yes, they were asked "How many promotions have you received within management in your current organization?"  The value listed in response to this question was compared with the values that the respondent listed against the set of questions:

·                          "In your organization's structure, how many levels/grades are present in the management hierarchy?"

·                          "How many levels/grades are above you in management?"

·                          "How many levels/grades are below you in management?" 

The total number of grades in each manager's organization were then computed by adding one to the total number of grades above (X) and below (Y).  The reason for adding one was to denote the grade level that the respondent currently occupied.  In other words, the total number of grades or levels in the managerial hierarchy was X+Y+1.  The number of grades below the grade currently occupied by the respondent was then cross-checked against the figure listed in response to the question on the number of promotions gained in the managerial hierarchy of that organization, the tenure with the organization in which (s)he held membership, and the time at which the respondent had been promoted in order to verify that the respondent had in fact ascended the managerial hierarchy in that organization and had not been recruited from outside.

Control Variables

Education, tenure and age were used as control variables in the regression analyses presented here.  The reason for using these variables is as follows:  Wise (1975a) determined that better educated employees have greater promotion opportunities while Rosenbaum (1984) proffered that organizational tenure predicts promotion rates and that promotion chances decline with age.

            Education was assessed by asking the respondents, "How many years of college education have you had?” This is a continuous variable measure, and also with the use of a categorical measure presented in Table 1.  Their tenure in the current organization was appraised with the help of the question, "How long have you been with your current organization (years/months)? _______ year(s), ________ month(s)."  Age was measured with the question, "What is your age? __________ years."

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Results

The survey descriptives are presented below in Table 1. 

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The means, standard deviations and correlations of measures from the study are presented below in Table 2.