Chapter 7: The Coevolution of Friendship and Leadership Networks in Small Groups

Human groups are more than mere averages of the characteristics of their members: They are also structured patterns of interpersonal relations. Some members see one another as friends; others don't. A few individuals are seen as leaders; most are not. These different and crisscrossing interpersonal relations can influence one another over time. Group members who share one kind of relation (e.g., friendship) can come to share a different kind of relation (e.g., leadership). The idea that members of human groups are connected through structured informal relations, of course, is not new (e.g., Durkheim, 1893; Moreno, 1934). What is new is the precision and theoretical sophistication with which the structure of these relations has come to be represented and analyzed. The burgeoning research on “social network analysis” has shown that the structure of informal group relations can have consequences for a number of important outcomes, such as the satisfaction and performance of group members (for a review, see Kilduff & Tsai, 2003). Yet, despite the advances in our knowledge of the consequences of social networks in small groups, fundamental questions related to how different social networks arise and coevolve remain unanswered.