THE FRIENDSHIP NETWORK AS A DECISION-MAKING RESOURCE - DISPOSITIONAL MODERATORS OF SOCIAL INFLUENCES ON ORGANIZATIONAL CHOICE

The patterns of interview choices of 170 Masters of Business Administration students were tracked unobtrusively over 5 months. Two personality variables, self-monitoring (SM) and social uniqueness, were used to partition the sample. The results confirmed that personality types hypothesized to differ in their preferences for social comparison information did differ significantly both with respect to how much their decision patterns resembled those of their friends and with respect to the criteria they used in the decision-making process. In contrast to recent critiques of the SM construct, the research provides evidence in support of an SM typology assessed by a unitary factor underlying responses to the Self-Monitoring Scale. In general, the results suggest that the social network, as a decision-making resource, may be as much an expression of personality as it is a constraint on individual choice.