The Networking Behavior Of Professional Women: The Impact Of Family Structure And Proactive Personality

With more and more importance attached to social networks, the networkingbehavior as an act variable of social networks is attracting people’s attention,especially for the professional women’s networking behavior. There are manystudies on characteristic differences in male and female social networks, and somehave shown that the social network of professional women and men show differentcharacteristics. However, there are few scholars dedicating to professional women inthe field of networking behavior, even little study is done on the impact ofprofessional women’s networking behavior in the viewpoint of the family structurefactors. At the same time, although there are already studies confirming the impact ofproactive personality on the networking behavior, but whether it can constitute amoderator of the relationship between family structure and networking behaviorremains to be tested.Therefore, this study takes the special group of women - professional women asthe research subject, and attempts to explore the impact of family structure (as theindependent variable) and proactive personality (as the moderate variable) onnetworking behavior of the professional women through empirical research, in theexpectation of contributing to fill the existing gap in both theory and practice.To this end, we firstly do the literature review. Forret & Dougherty (2001)discussed the possibility of differences between male and female on networkingbehaviors, that is, men are more likely than women to participate in social behaviors.This may be explained by the fact that the professional women subject more to pressure from the families when they want to pursue career development. Althoughprofessional women face such adverse conditions, the individuals with a proactivepersonality will not endure being the recipient of the environment only. They willmake efforts to change the environment (Bateman & Crant, 1993; Seibert, 1999;Thompson, 2005). They will be more motivated to break through the limitations ofreality, so as to strive for professional success (Johnson, 1995).Based on the above research and inferences, We proposed our theoreticalmodels and the following assumptions: compared with the other two types ofprofessional women, unmarried career women will engage in more networkingbehaviors; married but childless career women will engage in more networkingbehaviors than married professional women with underage children; the proactivepersonality will moderate the relationship between the networking behaviors and thefamily structure of professional women.To test the above hypothesis, this study used questionnaires for data collection.In the end we had a total of 342 valid questionnaires. We used the statistical analysissoftware - SPSS16.0 to analyze and process the data, and finally concluded asfollows：(1) The marital status would influence the networking behaviors of professionalwomen: unmarried career women will engage in more networking behaviors thanmarried professional women;(2) Weather having underage children will influence the networking behaviorsof professional women: the married childless career women will engage in morenetworking behavior compared to married professional women with underagechildren;(3) The proactive personality will moderate the relationship between theprofessional women’s family structure and their networking behaviors: among theprofessional women who are in the same family structure, the ones who have strong proactive personality will engage in more networking behaviors than the ones whohave weak proactive personality.Based on these results, this paper provides recommendations from theperspective of professional women’s human resource development and management.The employers may select individuals with specific personality traits througheffective recruitment and selection; also, the employers may provide moreprofessional support for the female employees, especially for female managers tomake it more convenient and efficient to engage in networking behaviors, thus tobenefit their career development.