Audience perceptions of high‐status ties and network advantage: The market for coaching jobs in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (2000–2011)

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2426
• Author: Stephen P. Borgatti,Daniel S. Halgin,Ajay Mehra,Scott Soltis
• Published date: 01 May 2020
• Date: 01 May 2020

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Audience perceptions of high-status ties and network

advantage: The market for coaching jobs in the National

Collegiate Athletic Association (2000–2011)

Daniel S. Halgin | Stephen P. Borgatti | Ajay Mehra | Scott Soltis

University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky,

U.S.A.

Correspondence

Daniel S. Halgin, University of Kentucky,

Lexington, Kentucky 40506, U.S.A.

Email: danhalgin@uky.edu

Summary

Social ties with high-status others can be a potent signal of an individual's underlying

quality and future promise. Individuals in competitive markets, therefore, have an

incentive to publicly claim connections to high-status others. However, cognitive lim-

itations and biases can make social network connections difficult for observers to

reliably discern, and claims to high-status ties can go unrecognized by the audience.

Our core contention is that claims to high-status affiliation are advantageous only

when the audience recognizes the claim—unrecognized claims, like unreliable signals,

do not deliver advantage and can backfire. Further, we draw on the literature on

imprinting and develop arguments for why some people are more likely to make

claims to high-status ties and why some claims to high-status ties are more likely than

others to be recognized by the audience. We test our arguments with data from the

market for head coaching jobs in NCAA basketball (2000–2011). Our study contrib-

utes to the sparse literature on how social network ties that exist in the minds of

third-party observers influence individual attainment in market settings; and it offers

new insights into how imprinting processes shape the perception and use of high-

status network ties.

KEYWORDS

cognition, imprinting, social networks

1|INTRODUCTION

The importance of social ties for the achievement of advantage in

market settings has been extensively documented, and the debate is

no longer about whether social ties confer advantage, it is about how

and why they do so. One line of thinking about the utility of social ties

has emphasized the role they play in facilitating the flow of resources

(e.g., information and advice) between individuals. Although this con-

ception of ties as pipes has been dominant in network research (see

Borgatti & Halgin, 2011), a different, more cognitive, strand of net-

work theorizing argues that ties are not merely pipes along which

resources flow; they are also social signals that attest to an individual's

underlying quality and future promise (Spence, 1973; Podolny, 1993;

cf. Connelly, Certo, Ireland, & Reutzel, 2011). Social ties to high-status

others, in particular, can be a source of advantage in market settings

because they are a signal of an individual's underlying quality, which

can otherwise be difficult to discern (Kilduff & Krackhardt, 1994;

Podolny, 2001).

Cognitively oriented network research on the benefits of high-

status ties has tended to study formal, readily discernible ties, such as

contractual relations among firms and banks in the investment bank-

ing industry (for a review, see Podolny, 2005). The formal nature of

these ties means it is a safe assumption that if a high-status tie

existed, it was likely to be have been perceived by the intended audi-

ence (see Sauder, Lynn, & Podolny, 2012, p. 274). But in many set-

tings, high-status ties are more informal in nature, which means that

Received: 24 April 2018 Revised: 18 December 2019 Accepted: 23 December 2019

DOI: 10.1002/job.2426

332 © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J Organ Behav. 2020;41:332–347.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job

their presence has to be inferred rather than looked up in some offi-

cial register. Even prosaic friendship ties in work organizations, for

example, can be opaque in the sense that actors and observers can

see the “same”tie differently (Kilduff & Krackhardt, 1994; Krackhardt,

1987).

The potential for individuals and audiences to see the same tie

differently may be especially pronounced when it comes to informal

ties with high-status others. For one thing, individuals are tempted to

claim high-status connections so they can bask in their reflected glory

(Kilduff & Krackhardt, 1994). However, as observers, individuals are

aware of this temptation and are therefore not likely to accept all

claims to high-status ties at face value (Cialdini, 1989). Even barring

skepticism, observers in the audience may fail to perceive or recall a

particular high-status tie. Audience members can be variably distrib-

uted across social and physical space, giving them differential access

to the behavioral and social cues from which the existence of informal

social ties is typically inferred (Heider, 1958, p. 69; Bondonio, 1998).

Whether a social tie to a high-status other is perceived can depend

upon one's vantage point. Moreover, observers have limited atten-

tional resources to devote to observing social network relations, and

network perceptions are subject to bias (e.g., Brashears & Quintane,

2015). Any individual who makes a claim to a high-status tie, there-

fore, runs some risk that the claim will not be recognized by the

audience.

We argue in this paper that the signaling benefits of high-status

ties are grounded in audience perceptions and this means that claims

to high-status affiliation are advantageous only when the audience

recognizes the claim—unrecognized claims, like unreliable signals, do

not deliver advantage and can backfire (cf. Connelly et al., 2011,

p. 52). Further, we draw on the literature on imprinting to develop

arguments for why some people are more likely to make claims to

high-status ties and why some claims to high-status ties are more

likely than others to be recognized by the audience.

Our study seeks to make two primary contributions. First, it offers

new ideas and results to a relatively neglected branch of organiza-

tional network research, one that views social network ties not merely

as entities in the world but also as cognitions in the minds of

observers (Krackhardt, 1987). In particular, our study seeks to add to

an understanding of the “downstream consequences of network per-

ceptions”(Brands, 2013, p. S82) by explaining how audience percep-

tions play a decisive role in determining whether individuals benefit,

in the market for jobs, from claims to high-status affiliation. Second,

our study contributes to a line of inquiry that challenges the conven-

tional view of social network ties as fast-decaying opportunity struc-

tures by showing how imprinted ties, forged during formative stages

in an individual's career, produce benefits over an extended period of

time (McEvily, Jaffee, & Tortoriello, 2012; Levin & Walter, 2018; see

the discussion in Marquis & Tilcsik, 2013, p. 219). What we add to this

nascent line of work is the idea that high-status ties that are forged

early in an individual's career exert an imprinting effect not just in the

minds of the individuals who possess the ties but also in the minds of

third-party observers. Previous research on imprinting in organiza-

tional contexts has tended to leave out or assume the role of audience

perceptions in shaping the outcomes that individuals experience as a

function of imprinting (cf. Tilcsik, 2012).

We tested our arguments using data from the job market for head

coaches in NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) basketball.

This setting allowed us to gather fine-grained, longitudinal data

regarding claims to high-status ties, audience perceptions of claimed

ties, and job attainment in a market setting. Moreover, the availability

of data on the historical performance of individual coaches allowed us

to statistically account for the likely effects of past performance on

future job attainment. We selected the context of professional sports

because the richness of data it offers makes it “an ideal natural labora-

tory”for studying organizational behavior (Smith, 2009, p. 203;

Kilduff, Crossland, Tsai, & Bowers, 2016). However, the phenomenon

of people using their contacts to high-status others for occupational

attainment is hardly confined to professional sports. Ties to legendary

business leaders, such as Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase,

for example, appear to have profound and enduring effects on mana-

gerial careers (e.g., Currie, 2015). Whether in professional sports or

business, individuals who claim high-status connections run the risk

that audiences will fail to recognize the connection as legitimate. Our

paper develops and tests theory that seeks to understand the role of

audience perceptions in the process whereby job seekers' claims to

high-status affiliation result in the attainment of more

prestigious jobs.

2|HIGH-STATUS TIES AND NETWORK

ADVANTAGE: THE ROLE OF AUDIENCE

PERCEPTIONS

Social network ties can help individuals gain advantage in market set-

tings, but not all ties are equally advantageous. Prior research suggests

that advantage is more likely to accrue from high-status ties—that is,

connections to individuals or entities who enjoy favorable positions in

the social hierarchies that define who defers to whom (Goode, 1978;

Whyte, 1943; for a review, see Sauder et al., 2012). In the job market,

an individual's ties to high-status others can provide the individual

with access to valuable resources, such as information, advice, and

referrals (Lin, Vaughn, & Ensel, 1981). But even in the absence of

actual resource transfer, high-status ties can be useful as signals that

help observers dispel the uncertainty involved in attempting to dis-

cern the underlying quality of individuals. This is for at least two

reasons.

First, high-status ties connect the focal individual to well-known

entities in the field. Decision makers are likely to feel less uncertain

about candidates with high-status connections than they do about

candidates lacking such ties. High-status actors tend to be well-known

individuals who serve as cognitive reference points in the field.

Because high-status actors are already familiar, individuals with ties to

high-status actors are themselves more easily categorized; and ease

of categorization is positively related to the allocation of attention

(Zuckerman, 1999; Zuckerman, Kim, Ukanwa, & von Rittman, 2003).

In the context of the job market, individuals with ties to high-status

HALGIN ET AL.333