The antecedents and consequences of employees’ followership behavior in social network organizational context: a longitudinal study

Abstract

AbstractThe social network is a social structure made up of individuals who are tied by social links. With the rapid development of information technology, online social networking services and microblogging service received a lot of attention. Social networks provide a comprehensive communication platform of interaction, knowledge sharing, information dissemination to people, etc. They also bring a significant impact on people’s working style and interpersonal communication. Drawing from trait theory, regulatory focus theory, followership theory, political skills, self-construal theory, and performance theory, this study systematically investigates the antecedents that induce the difference in followership behavior and the different consequences of behavior on job performance. We introduce a novel hybrid similarity measure, and the best matching based supervised learning process is conducted for training the time series. The events before the current timestamp can be adopted as a training set, and an early predictor will be generated by learning the rules from the training set. The newly coming events will be used for verifying the predictor, or assessing and tuning it. This paper clarifies the antecedents’ mechanism for differences in followership behavior and the consequence mechanism that followership behavior differently impacts job performance.