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Modeling Individual Outcomes Using a Multilevel Social Influence (MSI) Model: Individual Versus Team Effects of Trust on Job Satisfaction in an Organisational Context

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Multilevel Network Analysis for the Social Sciences

Part of the book series: Methodos Series ((METH,volume 12))

Abstract

In this chapter we propose an integrated approach to study the effects of individual network position and global network structure on the attitudes and opinions of individuals within groups. The Multilevel Social Influence (MSI) model used here is generic, and can incorporate both individual network position measures such as centrality or brokerage position, as well as group level network properties such as the density, centralization or fragmentation of the network. This enables the possibility to disentangle and identify the relative importance of “individual social capital” from “collectively owned social capital”. Focusing on 201 employees in 27 teams as a specific empirical example, we demonstrated how employee job satisfaction can be explained by looking at the individual attributes of the employee, the position of the employee in the group’s trust network (indegree centrality), and the group structure (density and centralization).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We will use social influence to describe any social process where connections impact individual outcomes, and we reserve the concept social contagion to represent the adjustment of one’s own behaviour to those of others (Friedkin 2001; Erickson 1988). Social influence can be contrasted to the other main type of social network studies, where the focus lies on social selection processes (de Klepper et al. 2010; Borgatti and Kidwell 2011, Agneessens and Wittek 2012). In the latter case, the main focus is on the question how ties emerge in between specific units or actors.

  2. 2.

    An additional reason for combining these results emerges when one deals with networks of small sizes and need to ensure that the model has enough power. Note that since we focus on social influence with an individual characteristic as the dependent variable, the model has N observations only (the number of individuals), and not (N*(N−1)).

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Tom Snijders for comments on an earlier version and the sociology students (Ghent University) and Danille De Lange for help with the practical data collection.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Surrey Business School, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK

    Filip Agneessens

  2. Social Statistics Discipline Area, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Johan Koskinen

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  1. Filip Agneessens
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Correspondence to Filip Agneessens .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. CSO-CNRS, Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, SPC, Paris, France

    Emmanuel Lazega

  2. Nuffield College, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

    Tom A.B. Snijders

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Agneessens, F., Koskinen, J. (2016). Modeling Individual Outcomes Using a Multilevel Social Influence (MSI) Model: Individual Versus Team Effects of Trust on Job Satisfaction in an Organisational Context. In: Lazega, E., Snijders, T. (eds) Multilevel Network Analysis for the Social Sciences. Methodos Series, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24520-1_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24520-1_4

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