Employees’ career trajectories in project-based organizations are closely associated with their project participation history. Yet, little is known about what features make a project stand out as a career booster for its participants and who obtains more career benefits than others from working on “hotshot” projects. In this study, we focus on a unique feature of projects—project status—and theorize about potential network-related sources from which it derives. Specifically, we develop arguments for how the pattern of a project’s social relations with other projects in the project network reflects the project’s status. Then, we deduce hypotheses regarding the impact of project status on employees’ career advancement and the moderating role of one’s hierarchical level in this relationship, drawing on the literature on status diffusion, endorsement, evaluative uncertainty, and attribution. Our empirical examinations entailed two studies. Study 1 provides evidence for the validity of using a network structural feature of a project to indicate its status using data from a high-tech company’s R&D projects. Study 2 tested our hypotheses by leveraging a sample of over 1,000 IT specialists in a multinational accounting firm tracked over five years. We found that employees assigned to higher-status projects received faster promotions. This career advantage was moderated by a person’s organizational hierarchical level in a complex way such that middle-level people obtained more rapid promotions when assigned to high-status projects than their bottom- or top-level counterparts.

中文翻译：

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项目状态对职业成功的重要性：网络视角


员工在基于项目的组织中的职业轨迹与他们的项目参与历史密切相关。然而，对于哪些功能使项目脱颖而出成为参与者的职业助推器，以及谁从参与“热门”项目中获得的职业利益比其他人更多，人们知之甚少。在这项研究中，我们关注项目的一个独特特征——项目状态——并对其衍生的潜在网络相关来源进行理论化。具体来说，我们提出了一个项目与项目网络中其他项目的社会关系模式如何反映项目状态的论点。然后，我们借鉴了关于状态扩散、认可、评价不确定性和归因的文献，推断了关于项目状态对员工职业发展的影响以及一个人的等级在这种关系中的调节作用的假设。我们的实证检查包括两项研究。研究 1 提供了证据，证明使用来自高科技公司研发项目的数据使用项目的网络结构特征来指示其状态的有效性。研究 2 利用了一家跨国会计师事务所 1,000 多名 IT 专家的样本，进行了五年的跟踪，从而检验了我们的假设。我们发现，分配到更高级别项目的员工获得更快的晋升。这种职业优势受到一个人的组织等级级别的复杂调节，因此当被分配到高地位的项目时，中层人员比底层或高层人员获得更快的晋升。