a social influence analysis of perceived organizational support

network data concerning recurring interactions compared to other procedures such as having
employees recall the individuals with whom they maintain relationships. Pictures of all
employees were provided along with the survey so that employees were more confident that they
were answering questions about the correct individuals. Employees were asked to indicate if
they considered another employee to be a friend, a source of advice, a role model, and someone
with whom they had frequent contact (see below for more description of the measures).
Employees were instructed to write “skip” across the line in the survey containing their own
name. This allowed the researcher to identify respondents without formally requesting that they
provide their names.
In the remaining part of the survey, employees were asked about their perceptions of
organizational support as well as demographic information including gender and tenure. All
measures are explained in greater detail in the following section. The survey itself is provided in
the Appendix.
Measures
In the following section, the measures utilized in this study are described in detail.
Similarity in Perceived Organizational Support. The dependent variable in this study is
similarity in perceived organizational support. Similarity is the extent to which the participant’s
POS is similar to those of each of his/her network ties. The similarity in POS measure was
created by completing the following steps. First, each participant was asked about his or her
POS using Eisenberger et al.’s (1997) eight-item version of the Short Survey of Perceived
Organizational Support (see Appendix for actual items). Participants responded using a five-
point Likert scale ranging from 1 = strongly disagree and 5 = strongly agree. Next, each
participant’s responses to the SPOS were averaged to create a mean POS score in which higher
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