Visiting scholar Yuval Kalish will be presenting “Till Stress Do Us Part: Linking Communication networks, Stress and Voluntary Exit in Extreme Contexts”  on Monday, August 29, 2011 10:30-11:30 a.m.

Research has linked stress with various withdrawal behaviors, including voluntary exit from groups. research also demonstrated that stress is contagious – it spreads among group members. However, there is no detailed theory or study of the mechanisms by which stress is disseminated by individuals to others in a group. We discuss and empirically test four stress-related processes that explain why some individuals voluntarily leave their group.

Two hundred and seventy-eight individuals (17 groups) in a unique military setting were measured for their communication-network structure and individual stress at three time-points. Using HLM and stochastic actor-oriented models for social networks, we found support for stress-related withdrawal and selection, and for stress-contagion. Managerial implications are discussed.

Yuval Kalish is assistant professor at the Department of Management, Tel Aviv University. His research focuses on the relationship between individual attributes, networks structures and outcomes within and between organizations. He focuses on the modeling of social networks using Exponential Random Graph models (for which he jointly received the most cited paper award in Social Networks) and other analytic techniques. He teaches courses on leadership, conflict management, statistics and network analysis.

Download the flyer here.

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Till Stress Do Us Part

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