This study integrates research on social networks and interpersonal counterproductive behaviours to examine the role of third party relationships in predicting an individual's susceptibility to co-worker mistreatment, and in moderating the relationship between co-worker mistreatment and job performance. Third party embeddedness and network closure are examined in the formal workflow network and the informal liking network. Results obtained from employees in a family-owned Chinese business in Singapore indicate that an individual is more likely to be mistreated by a co-worker when both parties are strongly embedded in mutual third party relationships in the workflow network, and that the individual is less likely to be mistreated when both parties are strongly embedded in the liking network. At the individual network level, network closure (i.e., the extent to which an individual's contacts are themselves connected to one another) in the workflow network increases the likelihood that a co-worker will mistreat the individual, but closure in the liking network weakens the negative relationship between mistreatment and performance. The findings offer a network-based perspective to understanding interpersonal mistreatment and counterproductive work behaviours, particularly in the context of Confucian Asian firms, and provide practical implications for organizations and individuals to reduce counterproductive behaviours at work.

A long-standing debate has taken place in the organizational sociology and social network literatures about the relative advantages of network closure versus structural holes in the generation of social capital. There is recent evidence that these advantages differ across cultures and between East Asia and the West in particular, but existing network models are unable to explain why or address cultural variation in general. This paper seeks to provide a solution by integrating a culture-embedded rational model of action into the social network model of structure, using this not only to re-examine the closure versus structural hole debate, but also to tie it to the literature on Confucian capitalism and the ‘East Asian Model’ of the firm. We argue that this integrated approach allows us to systematically analyse the relationship between culture and behaviour in networks and, more specifically, to explain why closure has been a more powerful source of productivity in East Asia than the West.