Wharton research emphasizes socializing at work

Recently, Wharton assistant professor Lynn Wu sent shockwaves through the labor market.

In 2013, Wu published a study titled "Social Network Effects on Productivity and Job Security: Evidence from the Adoption of a Social Networking Tool" in information systems research. Her research found that a person’s engagement in social communication, and not the financial value generated by their work, was the most indicative factor of job retention and promotion. 

Wu is eager to point out that social communication precedes value added only when comparing workers whose financial contributions to a firm are not drastically different from one another. Nonetheless, that caveat hasn’t stopped mainstream media, including the Wall Street Journal, Men’s Health and Glamour, from publishing her findings.

“I looked at all the great CEOs in history, all the presidents, and I noticed none of them had Ph.D.s,” Wu said, who received her bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She credits “the people I knew, my network” as instrumental to her academic development all the way back to grade school.

After analyzing email information from 8,000 workers at a consulting firm over a two-year period, Wu concluded that certain keywords were directly correlated to professional success. 

In order to keep the contents of the emails private, Wu did not have access to individual emails and could only observe specific keywords picked up by an algorithm based on how often they were used. 

The most important words related to job retention and promotion, she found, were: lunch, coffee, football and baseball. Wu was surprised by the results, which she said contradicted her original hypothesis — that earnings would be far more important when it comes to job retention than social communication. 

She looked to explore how social communication could trump the profit motive, which was supposed to guide managers’ decisions. According to Wu, the answer was in the pace of technological innovation.

“Nowadays your knowledge base does not matter as much, but rather who you know,” she said. She added that machines and search tools make it increasingly easy for highly specific information to be obtained, and now what matters most is an individual’s ability to interpret data. Hence, social communication is indicative of the increasing importance of personal skills that cannot be easily replaced by machines. Wu singled out creativity and social capital as areas that future workers will have to focus on if they don’t want their abilities to be rendered useless by new technology.

"In the short run you will see the democratization of information, and later on a renewed concentration," Wu said. "What you see now is a superstar effect."

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