Jorge Walter's Blog

Greetings from Strategic Management Society’s 38th Annual Conference in Paris, where I served as the Program Chair for the Strategy Process Interest Group as well as the co-chair of the Executive Discoveries Series.

Together with my fellow IG Track Chairs, I am attending the back end of the SMS Special Conference in Oslo, and we just finalized the program for the SMS 38th Annual Conference in Paris.

Thanks to Niko Pelka and his team for hosting another very productive meeting!

A new article “Before they were ties: Predicting the value of brand-new connections,” co-authored with Daniel Levin (Rutgers University), has just been accepted for publication in the Journal of Management.

Complementing and extending prior studies on the value of existing work relationships, this study examines whether we can predict the value of brand-new ties before people ever meet. We examine this question by developing three sets of hypotheses reflecting the three main perspectives in the social networks literature: the resource (actor), dyadic (tie), and structural (network) perspective. To test our hypotheses, we asked executives to reach out for advice from someone they had never met and to complete a survey of their various thoughts about the other person both before and after making a connection. We find support for all three perspectives after a connection has been made; however, before tie formation, we find evidence only for the structural perspective. Our results suggest that the lack of reliable information about strangers obscures which brand-new ties will turn out to be more valuable but that surrounding network structures remain a reliable predictor of value, even for brand-new ties.

My co-author Daniel Levin (Rutgers) and I just published a commentary titled “Is tie maintenance necessary?” in the Academy of Management Discoveries.

In this commentary, we build on our research on dormant ties to contrast what we would call the activity-based perspective of tie maintenance—i.e., the premise underlying the vast majority of social networks research that ties to individuals who are associated with one’s past are important to maintain—with we would call the memory-based perspective on tie maintenance, i.e., that the memory of a prior relationship is often sufficient and that past relationships can retain considerable value, without the need for active maintenance.