Tag Archives | Social Structure

When Do Haters Act? Peer Evaluation, Negative Relationships, and Brokerage

Jason Greenberg, Christopher C. Liu, Leanne ten Brinke

Sociological Science April 17, 2024
10.15195/v11.a16


In many organizational settings, individuals make evaluations in the context of affect-based negative relationships, in which an evaluator personally dislikes the evaluated individual. However, these dislikes are often held in check by norms of professionalism that preclude the use of personal preferences in objective evaluations. In this article, we draw from social network theory to suggest that only individuals that are network brokers—those who have the cognitive freedom to flout organizational norms—act to down-evaluate the peers they dislike. We evaluate our theory using two complementary studies: one field site study and an experiment. Our results, consistent across two different methodologies, suggest that overlooking an evaluator’s negative relationships as well as the network positions that constrain or enable an individual’s actions may lead to distortions in ubiquitous organizational peer evaluations processes and outcomes.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Jason Greenberg: SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell University
E-mail: Jg2459@cornell.edu

Christopher C. Liu: Lundquist College of Business, University of Oregon
E-mail: chrisliu@uoregon.edu

Leanne ten Brinke: Department of Psychology, The University of British Columbia
E-mail: Leanne.tenbrinke@ubc.ca

Acknowledgements: We thank Anne Bowers, Gino Cattani, Sheen Levine, Andras Tilcsik, Catherine Turco, Ezra Zuckerman, and seminar participants at Harvard and NYU for useful feedback on an earlier draft. All errors and omissions are ours alone. This study was IRB approved: (a) NYU IRB HS#10-8124 and (b) Oregon IRB STUDY00001144.

Supplemental Material

Replication Package: Our experiment was preregistered at (https://aspredicted.org/YHD_W9P). A replication package has been deposited at (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/4MOJVQ).

  • Citation: Greenberg, Jason, Christopher C. Liu, and Leanne ten Brinke. 2024. “When Do Haters Act? Peer Evaluation, Negative Relationships, and Brokerage.” Sociological Science 11: 439-466.
  • Received: October 20, 2023
  • Accepted: December 23, 2023
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Stephen Vaisey
  • DOI: 10.15195/v11.a16


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