Bridge supervision affects manager style, not performance

The context

Management research, which taps into psychology and sociology, is rooted in the golden age of social psychology. Within this context, an undeniably productive research stream has long linked the performance of managers to their surrounding social networks. Indeed, generally speaking, managers who coordinate colleagues who are disconnected from one another earn higher pay and have better assessments, come up with more value-generating ideas, and get promoted more quickly to leadership positions, compared to their peers. Traditionally, research has focused on modelling the manger as “ego,” working with colleagues who are connected in various ways.

This research stream, as we’ve said, has proven rewarding, but it has ignored a quite common condition: there are work environments in which one colleague stands out from the others, but not in the sense of being more central. Instead, ego’s role is defined exogenously in relation to the colleague, so much so that ego’s behavior depends to a great extent on the network surrounding the colleague, as well as the network surrounding ego.

The research

In our study, we assert that “bridge supervision” influences the ways in which managers play their roles. Specifically, such supervision shapes their management style, but not their performance. Bridge supervision happens when the link between the manager and the boss serves as a bridge between separate social spheres. To verify our hypotheses, we expanded our predictions on the “ego network” (i.e., data regarding the network around ego) and applied the operating concept of the “dyad network.” This is made up of ego, the colleague, the key contacts they share, and the key contacts they each have separately. How ego and the colleague are linked to their mutual networks is a factor in ego’s behavior.

The structure that defines a condition of bridge supervision is distinguished by separate, cohesive networks that develop around the manager vs boss dyad. From this structure, and given the mechanism of social pressure that pushes toward conformity within informal groups, we predict that bridge supervision has correlates which we can describe as “role segregation.”

The dimensions of role segregation vary depending on degree of contrast between personal and impersonal. When managers work under a bridge supervision model, such supervision will more likely be impersonal, and the connection with their boss will probably be quite a distant one. This means that managers and bosses behave like representatives of separate constituencies, and managers consider their boss as simply one of the many elements that characterize the situations that they discuss with their colleagues.

In other words, we can expect bridge supervision to be associated with role segregation between manager and boss, which gives rise to two hypotheses:

1. The probability of role segregation decreases with the number of mutual contacts shared by manager and boss.
2. The probability of role segregation increases with the density of connections among a manager’s exclusive contacts.

To clarify, by “exclusive contacts” here we mean colleagues of the manager but not of the manager’s boss.

To test our hypotheses, we used a group of supply chain managers who work at a large US electronics company that has establishments in various cities all over North America. We gleaned our data from company personnel records and a network survey, and then explored the network structure of how supervision is exercised.  We also investigated whether the bridge supervision model can explain why some managers perform better or worse than previously predicted.

Conclusions and takeaways

Bridge supervision happens when the connection between manager and boss serves as a network bridge between separate social spheres. Advances in communication technologies have facilitated the use of bridge supervision, which fosters more fluid integration between managers and bosses. However, managers that operate under bridge supervision tend to exclude their boss from their work discussions and avoid expressing their emotions.

The main conclusion of our work is the verification that bridge supervision affects manager style, but not performance. Our study provides four interesting contributions that warrant future study.

1. We deepen our understanding of a common condition in organizational life which will likely become even more prevalent in the future: bridge supervision.
2. We open up new possibilities for contamination between network and management theory.
3. We enrich research methodology by extending the ego network around an individual to the dyad network around a pair of individuals connected by a critical kind of relationship. Dyad networks are an intermediate strategy that captures variations in contexts in which a critical relationship exists. This gives us a lens on performance correlates of the relationship that are contingent on context. In fact, we would be hard pressed to identify bridge supervision without knowing the dyad network surrounding manager and boss.
4. We go one step further in eliminating confounding factors in the thriving research on performance returns to network brokerage.