The Networks of Others: A Model of Secondhand Brokerage and its Effects on Employee Innovation

Social network research on creativity and innovation has primarily focused on the focal employee (i.e., ego), implicitly assuming that ego’s own network position determines the resources available for creative work. We advance an alter-centric perspective, arguing that what matters is not merely the availability of diverse information but the capacity of network contacts (i.e., alters) to make it usable. The brokerage characteristics of ego’s alters (i.e., secondhand brokerage) are decisive in that alters who are brokers are likely to have both valuable non-redundant information and the capability to convey it effectively. Prior work treating secondhand brokerage as a monolithic construct has yielded equivocal results; we reconcile these findings by decomposing it into distinct forms and matching each to the demands of a specific phase of the innovation process (i.e., idea generation, idea elaboration, idea championing, and idea implementation). We theorize that external secondhand brokerage facilitates idea generation, internal secondhand brokerage facilitates idea elaboration, internal alters’ network oscillation facilitates idea championing, and external alters’ network oscillation facilitates idea implementation, with ego’s knowledge integration capability, psychological ownership, organizational status, professional status, and tie strength serving as phase-specific and cross-phase boundary conditions. In doing so, we also challenge the prevailing view of brokers as default opportunists, specifying when cooperation, rather than opportunism, is the more rational strategy. By integrating the social network and innovation literatures, our framework clarifies how, when, and why the networks of others shape ego’s success across the innovation process.