Personal Professional Networks: Their Effect on Extracurricular Work Behaviors Among IT Professionals

Personal professional networks, or the set of peers an individual socializes with outside of organizational boundaries, are gaining more and more attention in a business environment that is increasingly volatile. Besides blurring the lines between personal and professional lives, personal professional networks require grooming—time often taken away from work. This paper is set out to study the influence of personal professional networks in juxtaposition with organizational commitment on extracurricular work behaviors. Extracurricular work behaviors describe work behaviors that are discretionary and not explicitly linked to an employee’s role description within the organization, but uses portions of work time to be conducted. Analyzing 621 IT professionals across the U.S., we find that an IT professional’s dependence on personal professional networks is more predictive of extracurricular work behaviors than organizational commitment; we also find that an IT professional’s dependence on personal professional networks has no impact on his turnover intentions.