Angry Entrepreneurs: A Note on Networks Prone to Character Assassination
Ronald S. Burt, Jar‐Der Luo · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2017
A great deal of attention is given to the benefits of bridging structural holes in a network, but relatively little attention is given to the costs involved in building the bridge. Here we study the risk of character assassination. Bridge relations are prone to difficulty from conflicting interests, indifference, and misunderstandings. More, bridge relations adjacent to a closed network are prone to character assassination – sympathetic gossip within the closed network encourages ego to blame bridge difficulty on the character of the person on the other side of the bridge. We propose an assassination index measuring the extent to which each of a person’s relationships is a bridge adjacent to a closed network, and thus prone to difficulty and character assassination. The index does well in predicting who Chinese entrepreneurs cite as their most difficult colleague, and predicting which entrepreneurs blame the difficulty on the colleague’s character (rather than the colleague’s competence, or a generally difficult situation). The results provide yet another instance of similar network mechanisms operating in East and West, here illustrating one of the pathologies associated with closed networks, which are so often touted as especially valuable in the East.