Role innovation through employee social networks: The embedded nature of roles and their effect on job satisfaction and career success

We theorize that the location of individual actors in the context of the larger social network within the organization has important but to date overlooked implications for employee role innovations. Complementing past research that places primary emphasis on individual predictors of role innovations, we developed arguments about the nature of basic characteristics of the social structure (the nature of distal and proximal ties) as resources that provide employees with the potential to be innovative about their roles in ways that enhance job satisfaction and career success.