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NETWORKING STRATEGIES OF PINK-SLIPPED EMPLOYEES:
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN
MELODY L. WOLLAN
Ph.D. candidate, University of Nebraska &
Visiting Lecturer, Clemson University
Department of Management
PO Box 341305
Clemson, South Carolina 29634-1305
DEBORAH WRIGHT BROWN
Assistant Professor of Management
Presented at Eastern Academy of Management
May 2001
An earlier version of this article was published in the Proceedings
NETWORKING STRATEGIES OF PINK-SLIPPED EMPLOYEES:
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN
ABSTRACT
We examined status and gender composition of men and women’s networks (n = 277) of involuntarily unemployed individuals actively seeking employment. Findings indicate women in professional, technical, or managerial (PTM) job classifications seek contacts both male and female, and of a higher job status than themselves. PTM men seek male contacts of similar occupational titles. Women in all other (AO) job classifications seek out both male and female contacts, and of multiple levels of occupational status.
NETWORKING STRATEGIES OF PINK-SLIPPED EMPLOYEES:
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN
In the early 1990s networking was touted as an essential skill for career survival (Hardin, 1995; Sorohan & Petrini, 1994; Tyler, 1994). Over the last five years, however, the Internet has experienced explosive growth as a job searching venue, luring job searchers to its highways through a professed ease in which employment opportunities are found (Walker, 2000). In addition, human resource related magazines and trade journals advise human resource professionals on the intricacies and benefits of hiring on the web (Hays, 1999; Whaley, 1998). We recognize the Internet as an important source for finding jobs and candidates. However, the Internet is not a panacea. A nationwide survey conducted by an outplacement firm, OI Partners, clearly demonstrated that for job searching and applicant recruiting, networking is more effective than on-line searching (see Leonard, 1999). We argue, along with others, that networking in contemporary times has attained heightened importance in the quest for career and business success.
In this study, we focus on networking and adopt the definition of networking provided by Forret and Dougherty as “individuals’ attempts to develop and maintain relationships with others who have the potential to assist them in their work or career” (2000: 59). Many agree that men and women engage in the practice of networking (Marsden, 1987; Moore, 1990; Scott, 1996). However, there is also agreement regarding the inability of women to make important connections involving access to an organization's dominant coalition and/or to centrally located interaction networks, typically comprised of men (Albrecht, 1983; Brass, 1985; Kanter, 1977). From these and other works, a central theme has emerged in the literature asserting women’s inability, unmatched by their male counterparts, to invoke career progress through participation in “old-boy” networks (Welch, 1980), and that male and female managers are not rewarded equally in their career progression for their personal investments (e.g., Stroh, Brett, & Reilly, 1992).
There are two dominant perspectives in the literature offering explanations for expected differences in the networks of men and women. The structural perspective argues the inability of women to make career-enhancing connections as a function of social situations of women compared to men (Fischer & Oliker, 1983) or similarly, the interaction of patriarchy and the structure of gender relations in which patriarchy exists as a system of social relations (Alvesson & Billing, 1997; Walby, 1990). Despite the fact that both men and women experience similar life-cycle events such as marriage and parenthood, women tend to incur a greater portion of the responsibilities from these life-cycle events. As such, compared to their male counterparts, women are compelled to spend more time developing domestically-supportive relationships. By taking on additional responsibilities for life-cycle events, women limit their resources and opportunities for the types of social situations that develop career-enhancing relationships, choosing instead social situations that are more closely related to their domestic responsibilities or “trading off” (Beggs & Hurlbert, 1997: 617) the convenience of finding a local job or flexible scheduling to minimize familial disruption at the expense of jobs with more prestige. Thus, the structural perspective depicts women as being precluded from making important employment-related connections.
Alternatively, the dispositional perspective argues the networks of men and women differ because of the inherent views that men and women maintain regarding the purpose and utility of relationships. Women are purported to act as catalysts in the development and maintenance of friendship networks in an effort to satisfy their strong desires for affiliation (Miller, 1986; Scott, 1996). Women, therefore, tend to form networks with people that are "socially comfortable", for example, kin and neighbors. Alternatively, men are argued to develop and maintain non-kin networks in an effort to satisfy their desires for self-enhancement (Miller, 1986). Men, therefore, tend to form a network of contacts from work-related situations and memberships in professional and voluntary associations (Smith-Lovin & McPherson, 1993). The dispositional perspective views both men and women in purposeful pursuit of relationships that satisfy important needs. However, the affiliations that women pursue are argued to be of little utility in the work-a-day world, particularly in terms of career development (Brass, 1984).
The structural perspective is more often adopted than the dispositional perspective to explain the networking differences among men and women (Moore, 1990). There is a conviction in the literature to attribute context to individual behaviors and outcomes over that of a set of personality characteristics (Brass, 1984; Kanter, 1979; Scott, 1996). Further, the link between individual difference variables (e.g., gender, school performance, and type A behavior) and search outcomes (e.g., the number of offers and quality of placement) is weaker than suggested in previous research (Steffy, Shaw, & Noe, 1989). A close review of the literature reveals that the structural perspective has primarily been examined within the confines of varying organizational contexts. Miller, Labovitz, and Fry (1975) examined network gender differences in public and private organizations. In their study, men associated work-related ties with friends to a greater extent than women. In addition, men indicated greater access than women to those who held top-level positions in the organization. Scott (1996) found this same relationship between gender and access to high-ranking individuals among a sample of corporate-government relations officials. Similarly, among a sample of personnel from a newspaper publishing company, Brass (1985) found that women were not centrally located in interaction networks and had limited access to the organization's "dominant coalition" and to contacts beyond their focal work units. Overall, results examining the networking strategies of men and women in organizations suggest that women have substantially less opportunity to make important connections compared to their male counterparts.
The intraorganizational networking strategies of men and women have received much research attention no doubt because of their disproportional importance and influence on the careers of men and women, particularly in terms of promotional and advancement opportunities within corporate walls. However, times have changed. Tight labor market conditions, corporate mergers and spin-offs, along with a movement towards boundaryless careers (Arthur & Rousseau, 1996) have put more pressure on individuals to develop their own careers both inside the organization and even more significantly, outside their current employing organization (Hall, 1996). Much of today's networking for career opportunities occurs external to the organization rather than on internal reliance alone on the hierarchy of the traditional agency. We argue that these conditions have provided both genders additional opportunities, but they have provided women greater gain than their male counterparts, and in a sense have equalized the playing field in terms of ability to make important, career-enhancing connections. Now, women's traditional networking resources have been legitimized as career-enhancing opportunities for employment outside of their organizations.
Tight labor market conditions and a desperate search for the best talent challenge conventional notions regarding women's inability to play the "old-boy" networking game. By examining the networking strategies of men and women removed from both the day-to-day activities and interactions of their organizational settings because of a recent layoff, this study examines the networking strategies of professional and non-professional people conducting a non-voluntary job search. Specifically, this article examines the characteristics of the networks of men and women, including occupational status of contacts and gender composition of those removed from the organizational boundaries. We draw upon Laumann's (1966) homophily/heterophily perspective to develop hypotheses predicting the gender and status composition of the networks of men and women.
HOMOPHILY AND HETEROPHILY
Laumann's (1966) heterophily/homophily principles received much research attention in the sociological literature, particularly regarding the characteristics of networks developed to facilitate the job search process (e.g., Lin, Ensel & Vaughn, 1981). The principles of heterophily/homophily, also known as the prestige/like-me principles, argue that individuals tend to reach either upwardly or laterally in the status hierarchy in order to attain desired goals and objectives, specifically finding and getting "better" jobs. In literature examining job search strategies, the use of status is a common construct and may take the form of occupational prestige using measures such as the Nams-Power Index (Powers & Holmberg, 1978), a derivative (e.g., Beggs & Hurlbert, 1997), or relative occupational hierarchical distance (e.g., Leicht & Marx, 1997).
The prestige/like-me principles, representing theories of social resources, argue that the outcomes derived from an individual's actions are directly related to the individual's access to social resources (Lin, Dayton, & Greenwald, 1978; Lin & Dumin, 1986). The prestige principle argues that substantial gains accrue to low-status job seekers who contact individuals at the high end of the occupational status hierarchy. The high-status contact person is argued to be of critical importance to the low-status job seeker because of their assumed control over a large domain of resources. Thus, the prestige principle asserts that job seekers situated at lower levels in the status hierarchy are likely to achieve their job searching objectives by connecting with contact persons situated at higher levels in the status hierarchy. The like-me principle also argues the utility of the high-status contact person in facilitating job search objectives. However, this principle applies to the high-status job seeker, suggesting the high-status job seeker's tendency to reach for contact persons of similar status.
Answering the call to study social resources that show “how [network structure] is produced and reproduced by the details of everyday activity” (Granovetter, 1995: 152), recent research has begun to look at the use of social resources such as membership in voluntary organizations (Beggs & Hurlbert, 1997) and how context and gender interact to affect job search outcomes. It has been found that voluntary organizational contacts for job searching are gender homophilous and that both men and women seek out same-gender contacts when job searching. Further, gender homophily in women’s informal networks tends to lead them into jobs in female-dominated careers where pay, authority and benefits tend to be less than for male-dominated or gender integrated careers (Drentea, 1998).
The homophily principle has been applied widely to explain men and women's networks in terms of sex, race and education (Ibarra, 1992, 1995; Rogers & Kincaid, 1981). Overall, these studies and others demonstrate support for homophilous behaviors on the part of men and women because of the ease of communication in the workplace when interacting with similar others. According to Laumann (1966), ceteris paribus or other things being equal, it would be expected that men and women who successfully move up in the organizational hierarchy, determined by occupational status, would practice homophily in terms of contact status, reaching for contact persons of similar status to themselves. In addition, it would be expected that men and women who are less successful in advancing to more prestigious careers would practice heterophily in terms of contact status, reaching for contact persons of higher occupational prestige than themselves. However, Brass (1985) has argued based upon his findings, that career moves for women are likely to be accommodated via their ability to connect with more powerful others, indicated by those perceived as being part of the organization's dominant coalition and centrally located in important interaction networks. Kanter (1977) has similarly argued the importance of women connecting with high-status contacts. Thus, based upon these arguments, and recent findings by Leicht and Marx (1997) and Beggs and Hurlbert (1997), it would be expected that women occupying occupationally-prestigious positions would demonstrate heterophilous networking activities, reaching for contact persons of higher status than themselves. Men in this same group are like to have already developed relationships with the occupationally prestigious (Brass, 1985); therefore, it would be expected that they would locate "resourceful" contacts of similar status to themselves and that using gender homophilous networks would not have an adverse effect (Beggs & Hurlbert, 1997).
This study extends current research by examining the job search contacts of involuntarily unemployed men and women. Other research similarly examining men versus women’s job search methods has typically relied on databases of those currently holding jobs and looking to move up or on (Beggs & Hurlbert, 1997; Drentea, 1998). We assert that employed job seekers are more restricted than unemployed job seekers regarding their ability to access their entire social network to identify job opportunities. Holzer (1987) has argued the risks associated with job hunting while currently employed, particularly in terms of the ability to reveal intentions to search among certain types of contacts. In the present study we address the problems associated with limited access to ones network by utilizing an unemployed sample of job seekers.
In addition, we extend the job searching literature by examining both the influence of gender and the moderating effect of job seeker’s occupational prestige on job searching strategy. To assess these effects, we conduct analysis by splitting our sample based on gender as well by two job categories: the first category comprised of all professional, technical and managerial (PTM) personnel and the second category comprised of all other (AO) occupational classifications, including sales, clerical, craft and service workers. Following, we propose hypotheses that argue distinct networking strategies for men and women dependent upon their occupational prestige category.
H1a: Professional, Technical and Managerial (PTM) women will practice heterophily in terms of contact status, reaching for contacts of higher status than themselves. Their male PTM counterparts will practice homophily in terms of contact status, reaching for contacts of similar status to themselves.