On agency and its limits : the asymmetric effects of offsites on network tie formation

Corporate offsite meetings are a multi-billion-dollar industry, premised on the assumption that they play a crucial role in intra-organizational collaboration. In this paper, we empirically examine offsites – for the first time, to our knowledge – as opportunity shocks for intra-organizational networking and catalysts for meaningful changes in an organization's collaboration network. We find that attending an offsite leads participants to significantly increase the number of new network ties that they initiate, but that people who are unable to attend the offsite similarly increase their network outreach, suggesting deliberate compensatory behavior. However, attendees also receive more incoming requests from new collaborators following offsites, a benefit that does not accrue to non-attendees. These results are consistent with a conceptualization of opportunities as affecting network change in two distinct ways: through the changes the individual makes in her own network, which are subject to individual agency, and through the decisions made by others, which also shape the focal individual's network, but which fall outside of the focal individual's agency. Integrating the traditional egocentric perspective with an “altercentric” perspective moves us closer to understanding both an individual's agency to shape her evolving network and the limits on that agency