To Connect or Disconnect: Changing Workplace Networks in Response to Job Demands.

Involvement in workplace networks generates career advantages. The explanations for why people develop or dissolve these valuable relationships tend to center around interaction tendencies, due to proximity, homophily, or reciprocity, for example. Alternatively, people may purposively change their network ties in an effort to improve their work experiences, as indicated by job crafting theory. Specifically, work pace pressures and emotional demands have been shown to produce stress and strain. People may respond to these job demands by turning toward or away from their coworkers, affecting their access to valuable resources. We study whether and how people craft their work-focused and socially-focused workplace networks in response to job demands in an R&D department of a large Scandinavian bio-technology company, through three waves of data collected over eighteen months. Our results indicate that people faced with a high pace of work tend to shrink, or reduce the size of their socially-focused and work-focused networks, even after accounting for alternative explanations for network change. In contrast, people who perceive high emotional demands tend to build, or increase the size of their socially-focused networks. This work merges theories of organizational networks, job crafting and job demands-resources to provide an agent-driven explanation for network change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]