Brokers in disguise: the interplay of actual brokerage and socially perceived brokerage on network advantage

Interpersonal networks can be conceptualized not only as actual social structures surrounding individuals, but also as cognitive social structures stemming from individuals' perceptions of those relationships. Yet, most work on social networks adopts either a structural or a perceptual perspective. In this paper, I blend these two traditions examining how actual and perceptual brokerage jointly determine innovation performance. I hypothesize that while actual brokerage benefits individuals by exposing them to nonredundant information, socially perceived brokerage—being perceived to bridge across groups irrespective of one's actual network configuration—may trigger skepticism of brokers' motives that could impinge on their ability to innovate. As such, I argue that others’ perceptions of a focal actor’s brokerage opportunities constitute a critical contingency underlying network advantage. Using a multimethod approach, including a field study in a global consulting firm and a preregistered experiment, I find that individuals spanning structural holes achieve higher innovation performance when their colleagues perceive them to have closed rather than open networks, and that trust is the underlying mechanism driving this effect. Integrating insights from cognitive social structures into structural holes theory, this work illustrates the importance of considering both structural and perceptual mechanisms in modeling how individuals reap the benefits of brokerage.