The Incongruence Effect Of Friendship Network Centrality On Informal Leadership Emergence

With the rapid development of the Internet and the Internet of Things,individuals in the society are in contact with other individuals all the time,and the connection between individuals and the resulting relationship constitute the social network.According to social capital theory,social networks can effectively deliver information,resources and social support.At the same time,faced with the rapid change of the market,more enterprises began to adopt the organization mode of team and timely respond to the changes of the external environment.Therefore,scholars focus on the research on the integration of social network and team.Since the social network method reflects the relational characteristics of leadership,the application of social network analysis to the research on leadership has been widely recognized.Integrating balance theory with sense making theory,we develop a model that links the incongruence between in-degree and out-degree centrality in a friendship network(“centrality incongruence” hereafter)to the emergence of informal leadership.Informal leadership,in turn,has a positive influence on organizational identification.We surveyed 257 employees from 38 self-management business units at three observation points.Using polynomial regression and surface response analysis,we found that greater centrality incongruence was associated with higher levels of informal leadership emergence measured one month later.Through informal leadershi p emergence,centrality incongruence strengthened subsequent organizational identification after controlling for a baseline measure of identification.Besides,in the case of centrality incongruence,the in-degree centrality has a more significant incongruence effect on the emergence of informal leadership than the out-degree centrality.Our study points out the value of jointly considering in-degree and outdegree centrality in a friendship network in understanding their effects on leadership emergence and other work outcomes,and we provide a social network method for enterprises to explore and cultivate informal leaders and improve employees’ sense of identity and loyalty to the organization,which has practical application value.