Seminar – The effects of piqued curiosity on boundary-spanning networking in organisations

Professor Tiziana Casciaro, Rotman School of Management

Integrating the differentiated knowledge, skills, and experiences of its members is critical to the effective functioning of an organisation. Hence, interactions spanning formal organisational and informal social boundaries are a principal focus of organisational scholarship. Research has substantiated not only the range of important outcomes deriving from boundary-spanning networking, but also the formidable barriers to engaging in such networking. We argue that a chief impediment to boundary-spanning networking is a lack of motivation. Against this backdrop, we theorise that curiosity—which can be piqued by cues in the organisational environment—heightens individuals’ motivation to network across boundaries in organisations by promoting the drive to learn novel ideas, solutions, and opportunities. We designed and conducted a randomised-controlled-trial field study involving over 2,200 middle-managers in a North American financial services organization to test our predictions, and an experiment to substantiate the underlying causal mechanisms. The findings support our claims and illuminate the psychological foundations of boundary-spanning networking. Our results open new avenues for research, both on how curiosity affects networking and shapes network structure in organisations, and on how organisations induce curiosity in their members as the intrinsic drive to learn.

Speaker bio

Tiziana Casciaro is a Professor of Organizational Behavior and the Marcel Desautels in Integrative Thinking at the Rotman School of Management of the University of Toronto. Her research on organisational networks, professional networking, power dynamics, and change leadership has appeared in top academic journals in management, psychology, and sociology, and has received scientific achievement awards from the Academy of Management. Thinkers50 has recognised Tiziana as one of the thirty thinkers most likely to shape the future of how organisations are managed and led, and her research has been featured in the Economist, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, CBC, Fortune and TIME magazine. Most recently, she has co-authoured the book Power, for All: How it Really Works and Why It Is Everyone’s Business (Simon & Schuster, 2021). Originally from Italy, Tiziana received her BA in Business Administration from Bocconi University in Milan, and her MS and PhD in Organization Science and Sociology from Carnegie Mellon University. Before joining the University of Toronto, she served on the faculty of the Harvard Business School.

For more information, please contact Luke Slater.