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This study examines how the structure of referent networks, or the social network defined by knowing others’ reward levels, affects perceptions of distributive justice. The homogeneity of rewards in the referent network, the amount of inequality in the referent network, and an individual’s reward level are all associated with distributive justice perceptions. Several moderating relationships are also examined.

We relied on data from a controlled laboratory experiment to test a series of theoretically derived hypotheses.

The study shows that several aspects about the structure of the referent network are important for shaping perceptions of distributive justice. Specifically, the reward heterogeneity and amount of inequality in the network are found to be negatively associated with distributive justice, while reward levels are found to be positively associated with distributive justice. Furthermore, the effect of reward levels on distributive justice is moderated by both (i) the presence of a referential standard for rewards and (ii) the amount of inequality in the network.

While being among the first studies to demonstrate effects of referent networks on perceptions of fairness, it is unclear how group memberships combine with referent network effects and which factors may blur these relationships in uncontrolled environments. Subsequent scholarship on the effect of referent networks on justice perceptions should leverage multiple data sources.

Research on the effects of referents on justice perceptions has focused on particular referent individuals. We recast this issue in terms of referent networks, which highlights the empirical reality that individuals have a variety of sources or alters which could operate as referents.

This study aims to understand how social experience influences social entrepreneurial (SE) intentions through different types of self-referent beliefs and how gender affects this mechanism.

To test this study’s conceptual model, the authors conducted an online survey and recruited respondents via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. This study’s analysis is based on 743 responses. This study used structural equation modeling to test the main hypotheses, conducted decomposition tests using the bootstrapping method to test mediation effects via self-referent beliefs and executed multi-group analyses to examine gender-moderated mediation effects.

The results confirm that social experience significantly influences all three types of self-referent beliefs (entrepreneurial self-efficacy, SE self-efficacy and self-esteem). Furthermore, the mediating relationship across social experience, self-efficacies, and SE intentions is moderated by gender, as the relationships between social experience and self-efficacies are stronger for women than for men.

A clear gender gap exists in the way how social experience affects perceptual variables (self-referent beliefs), providing a practical suggestion to reduce the perceptual gender gap in social entrepreneurial contexts. This study also reveals the mediating mechanism across social experience, self-efficacies and SE intentions, also highlighting the importance of domain specific self-efficacies. This study’s findings support and extend Milliken’s (1987) framing of three distinct types of uncertainty to explain how individuals form SE intentions.

Academic social network site (ASNS) is a new form of academic service in the social media age, and the study of ASNS user behavior is of great significance to academic librarians due to its recent popularity. This research explores the influencing factors of the continuous usage intention of ASNSs.

A survey of academics in China was conducted, and 361 responses were collected and analyzed with a structural equation model, which involves satisfaction, continuous usage intention, expectation confirmation, perceived usefulness (PU), social identity, referent network size and perceived interactivity (PI).

Satisfaction, expectation confirmation, PU, referent network size, social identity and PI significantly impact continuous usage intention. Satisfaction is a mediating variable by which expectation confirmation, PU, referent network size, social identity and other influencing factors affect continuous usage intention. Expectation confirmation and referent network size are two endogenous variables that can explain and predict the continuous usage intention of ASNSs.

Existing research does not consciously distinguish between adoption, use and continuous use, and only scant studies have conducted empirical research. Further, despite the widespread ASNS usage in China, Chinese scholars' studies are few, as existing studies have mainly focused on users of the UK, the US and India.

In everyday life, as well as in work organizations, we engage in frequent and quite comfortable discourse about the nature of reputations, and wealso see personal reputation used as a basis for important human resources decisions (e.g., promotions, terminations, etc.). Unfortunately, despite its recognized importance, there has been very little theory and research on personal reputation in organizations published in the organizational sciences. The present paper attempts to address this need by proposing a conceptualization of personal reputation in organizations. In this conceptualization, reputation is presented as an agreed upon, collective perception by others, and involves behavior calibration derived from social comparisons with referent others that results in a deviation from the behavioral norms in one's environment, as observed and evaluated by others. Implications of this conceptualization are discussed, as are directions for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to apply social comparison theory to the study of managerial careers. It is proposed that how managers evaluate their career progression in comparison with the accomplishments of others will affect how they feel about their careers and organizations.

Male and female managers who were similar in age (±5 years) and from the same organization, functional area, management level, and region were asked to participate in the study. Data from 392 managers from lower and middle levels were used to test the study hypotheses. Respondents completed measures of upward comparisons, downward comparisons, enacted aspirations, competitiveness of work group, career satisfaction and turnover intentions.

Study results showed that social comparisons influence managers' turnover intentions and career satisfaction. Upward comparisons were found to be positively related to turnover intentions and career satisfaction. Downward comparisons were found to be negatively related to turnover intentions and positively related to career satisfaction. In addition, the competitiveness of the managers' work group and their enacted aspirations were found to be significant moderators. These findings emphasize the importance of relative standards in predicting managerial career attitudes.

The measures created to assess the degree to which individuals make downward and upward social comparisons when assessing their career progress should be tested in additional occupations and studies. Future research should investigate how social comparisons influence career attitudes beyond considering feelings of relative deprivation. In particular, researchers should aim to understand when upward comparisons are threatening or motivating.

The findings demonstrate that social comparisons can be quite prevalent within organizations and that the competitiveness of the organizational climate can have a significant impact on how social comparisons affect managers' career satisfaction. Therefore, organizations should be mindful of the climates they endorse. Furthermore, findings suggest that organizations should encourage managers to participate in career strategies since career strategies associated with enacted aspirations were found to enhance the effects of the social comparison process, leading to an increase in managers' career satisfaction and a decrease in their turnover intentions.

This is the first known study to empirically examine how upward and downward comparisons affect managers' turnover intentions and career satisfaction.

Drawing on the social learning theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine the antecedents and consequences of users’ excessive online social gaming. Specifically, the authors develop a model to propose that observational learning and reinforcement learning mechanisms together determine excessive online social gaming, which further foster adverse consequences.

The model is empirically validated by a longitudinal survey among users of a popular online social game: Arena of Valor. The empirical data are analyzed using component-based structural equation modeling approach.

The empirical results offer two key findings. First, excessive online social gaming is determined by observational learning factors, i.e. social frequency and social norm, and reinforcement learning factors, i.e. perceived enjoyment and perceived escapism. Second, excessive online social gaming leads to three categories of adverse consequences: technology-family conflict, technology-work conflict and technology-person conflict. Meanwhile, technology-family conflict and technology-work conflict further foster technology-person conflict.

This study contributes to the literature by developing a nomological framework of excessive online social gaming and by extending the social learning theory to excessive technology use.

How do females with multiple sources of identity deal with intersectional identity tensions and perceived lack of access to social power? The study focuses on how social relationships form and develop in masculinised settings between construction workers and a petite female researcher through perceived notions of equality and inequality. Through autoethnographic tales, the study examines how an academic home comer navigates between conflicting professional and cultural identities, in their native country.

Using collaborative autoethnography, the study examines how the intersections of being a young petite female and a “partial” insider in a male-dominated construction industry influences the researcher's identity work process and her quest for social power.

The findings suggest that to access referent social power, the researcher covers stigmatised intersectional attributes and reveals a more favourable identity. The fieldwork journey of the young petite female researcher highlights that identity work is a situational process that evolves with respondent relationships, respondent assigned roles, perceived notion of access to power and struggles of cultural versus professional identity. The reader is also taken through the collaborative autoethnographic journey of a female researcher and her doctoral studies supervisor.

This paper makes several contributions. First, it contributes to the academic literature on intersectionality of identity, especially concentrating on the intersectional attributes of petite physical stature, gender and perceived lack of access to social power. Second, this paper theorises identity work processes as an indirect strategy of social power in researcher-and-researched relationships. Last, through collaborative autoethnography of female researchers' fieldwork journey, this study contributes to the body of knowledge on academic home comers as “partial” insiders in their native country.

This study aims to present a conceptual model of how blog readers' perceptions of satisfaction generate blog loyalty, which in turn enhances bloggers' power. This study also seeks to investigate the moderating influence of subjective norms on the relationship between satisfaction and loyalty.

The structural equation modelling approach was used to estimate a conceptual model based on survey data from blog readers in Taiwan. After discarding incomplete responses, the final sample consisted of 567 completed responses.

The majority of the results supported the hypotheses. Three types of exchange outcome satisfaction influence blog readers' perceptions of bloggers' power by increasing attitudinal loyalty. Information satisfaction has a direct and positive effect on expert power. Most importantly subjective norms exhibited a positive moderating relationship between exchange outcome satisfaction and attitudinal loyalty. The authors found no evidence to support the relationship between exchange outcome satisfaction and behavioural loyalty.

From the perspectives of exchange outcome satisfaction, loyalty, power, and susceptibility to normative influence, this study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the process through which blog readers become loyal to their bloggers and are influenced by bloggers' expert and referent power.

This study aims to compare alternative search behaviors managers enact with regard to firm aspirations.

The behavioral theory of the firm predicts that poor performance relative to aspiration levels leads to search for ways to raise performance over aspirations. Most researchers have assumed search leads to risk‐taking or innovation. However, firms might search for ways to raise performance without incurring additional risk, such as reducing expenses. This paper compares the two models of search using data on research and development (R&D) spending.

The results generally support the cost cutting argument; R&D spending increases monotonically with performance relative to social aspirations.

These results suggest researchers need to consider searches that emphasize cost reduction, as well as searches that emphasize innovation.

Overall, this paper extends behavioral work on risk‐taking and R&D to provide a more complex view of the interactions between kinds of aspiration levels and both innovation and search behavior.

The existing literature involving director compensation has been concentrating on its absolute or intrinsic values. Although the relevant studies have generated mixed findings, research in other fields suggests that the power of an incentive may be determined by its value relative to the chosen referencing standard more than its absolute value. This study aims to investigate how relative director pay affects corporate investment efficiency.

This study takes a fresh theoretical viewpoint by framing the investigation using the dimensional comparison theory and proposing that a directorship also presents a relative value that may influence the board’s performance. Ordinary least squared regressions and two-stage system generalised method of moments are used to analyse 14,267 firm-year observations.

The empirical results suggest that the relative director pay is a better estimate of the power of the incentive than the absolute pay. A positive association between the relative director pay and investment efficiency is evident, while the absolute pay has no significant effect on investment decisions. Director overcompensation, however, will cancel out the positive effect of director compensation on investment efficiency. Firms with relatively lower unexpected investment (UI) level benefit the most from an increase in the relative director pay, while neither absolute nor relative director pay affects investment choices in firms with a high UI level because of significantly more overcompensation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first attempt to investigate the effect of relative director pay. It is also the first to examine the role of dimensional comparison in strategic decisions which is the single untended comparison framework in the director pay design. The current director pay structure has emphasised social and temporal equality by standardising the pay structure and vesting the equity-based pay over a long period. Yet it ignores the fact that people decide their commitment level by comparing the reward with an internal referent too. The findings speak to the dimensional comparison theory in that the inequality emanated from dimensional or internal comparison may be accentuated by the perceived equality in other comparison frameworks, driving the different performances in the roles one assumes.