Measuring Mediation and Separation Brokerage Orientations: A Further Step Toward Studying the Social Network Brokerage Process

Abstract

Brokerage has assumed an increasingly important role in social network research and organizing more generally. Social network research has traditionally defined brokerage in structural terms as a broker who stands between two disconnected parties. Alongside this structural definition, network research has generally made assumptions about, but rarely measured, the brokerage processes engaged when individuals inhabit such network positions. More recent work argues for explicitly addressing brokerage behavior, principally in the form of three brokerage action orientations that focus on distinct brokerage action: joining network contacts (or tertius iungens), mediating between network contacts, and separating network contacts. We advance this emerging research stream by developing measures of mediation and separation brokerage orientations. These two measures, alongside the preestablished tertius iungens measure (Obstfeld, 2005), present the opportunity to study the role of multiple brokerage orientations and social network structure together. In Studies 1, 2, and 3, we provide evidence for the convergent and discriminant validity of each measure. In Study 4, we establish criterion-related validity by demonstrating the importance of each measure on network structure and innovation outcomes. In so doing, we lay the groundwork for future research to explore how brokerage behavior orientations influence additional organizational phenomena.