Instrumental and Affective Ties within the Lab: The Impact of Informal Cliques on Innovative Productivity

In this paper, we contribute to research on networks and innovation by distinguishing between instrumental and affective ties and assessing their impact on individual innovativeness. In particular, using original data from the corporate R&D laboratory of a global pharmaceutical company, we evaluate how a specific structural arrangement (i.e. belonging to a clique) affects inventors’ innovative productivity. Our results show that both instrumental/knowledge-sharing cliques and affective/friendship cliques correlate positively with inventors’ innovative productivity. However, we also observe that when inventors straddle knowledge-sharing and friendship cliques, their innovative productivity declines.