Published on: May 8, 2025 at 5:24 pm
Adding or subtracting people from a team or department—or promoting someone within it—can enhance or detract from chemistry among colleagues, the effectiveness of teamwork, and the cohesiveness of organizational networks.
Academy of Management Scholar Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and the University of Exeter—who cowrote an Academy of Management Review article on this topic with Emily Rosado-Solomon of Babson College and David Allen of Texas Christian University and University of Warwick—said that the ways that organizations function aren’t solely based on people’s skills.
“Our employees are connected to each other and they aren’t only using their own knowledge and skills to get their work done; they’re also relying on others,” Methot said. “They go to others for feedback, advice, guidance, information, or mentorship, and they’re using that, leveraging that information to do better, to do their work better.
“Working to understand what HR policies are going to impact those connections and those relationships between people will help us better understand how they then perform in their job,” she said. “Diving in a little more deeply also leads to understanding how some of these HR practices and decisions that organizations are making can break up those networks and disrupt those relationships.
“On the one hand, they can help their formation, but on the other hand, they can really mess things up.”
Managers who can better understand how different types of HR practices might change employees’ sense of how they interact with others are more effective. Employees who are aware of various organizational networks can focus their networking and relationship-building efforts more productively.
“People’s definition of their role, how they interact with other people, who they report to, and who are on their team get disrupted when different HR practices move those individuals to another team or department or a different role with more responsibilities,” Methot said. “Let’s say they make a promotion decision—I’ve been working with someone on a team; we have a really great working relationship.
“We’re also friends; we trust each other, and then that person gets promoted and a new person gets put in their place,” she said. “I now have to build a whole new identity for how I relate to this new person, and that takes a lot of mental effort to rebuild this relational identity, this way of interacting with other people with whom we work.”
A sample of Methot’s AOM research findings:
