a social influence analysis of perceived organizational support

describe as noncompetitive, that drive POS. Accordingly, I expect that employees will likely
engage in association rather than comparison when discussing perceptions of organizational
support. This reasoning yields the following hypothesis:
Hypothesis 3: An employee’s perceived organizational support will be positively related
to the perceived organizational support of coworkers with whom that employee maintains
strong friendship relationships.
Employees may develop role model-friendship-advice ties with coworkers. Such
multiplex ties may be extremely influential because they are a source of social information
processing and social learning. However, they also may be a source of social comparison, which
could lead to dissimilarity in POS, as hypothesized in the preceding section. However, some
social comparison research indicates that employees will avoid making social comparisons with
individuals who are extremely successful because they recognize that they will never obtain such
success themselves, and therefore making such comparisons will lead to reduced self-concept
(Lockwood & Kunda, 1997; 1999). As a result, employees may avoid making social
comparisons with high-performing role models. Therefore, I expect an employee’s POS will be
positively related to the POS of role model-friendship-advice ties, as such ties will be a source of
social information processing and learning, but may not suffer because employees protect their
self-concepts by avoiding comparison with friend-role models.
Hypothesis 4: An employee’s perceived organizational support will be positively related
to the perceived organizational support of role models with whom they have strong
advice and friendship relationships.
Finally, although I offer this only as an exploratory hypothesis and do not formally test it,
I expect that consideration of strong friendship and advice ties (and other combinations of strong
friendship and advice ties) which require both frequency of contact and reciprocity will be more
strongly associated with similarity in POS than will consideration of strong friendship and advice
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