Rapid Relationality: How Peripheral Experts Build a Foundation for Influence with Line Managers

Relationality and Temporality in Organizations

Management research and the social sciences more broadly have taken a relational turn in recent decades, understanding individual action as embedded in a web of social relations (e.g., Emirbayer, 1997; Bradbury and Lichtenstein, 2000; Huising and Silbey, 2011) and recognizing one’s relational or social capital as an important source of power and determinant of success in organizational life (e.g., Granovetter, 1973; Coleman, 1988; Fernandez, Castilla, and Moore, 2000; Reagans, Zuckerman, and McEvily, 2004). Although we understand what characterizes relationships, such as rapport and trust (e.g., Kramer and Tyler, 1996), we know much less about the process through which relationships are formed in organizations, especially strategic or instrumental work relationships. Extensive research on social networks has identified numerous variables that affect the likelihood of relationship or tie formation, such as demographic similarity, cultural matching, proximity, and liking (e.g., McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook, 2001; Rivera, Soderstrom, and Uzzi, 2010; Rivera, 2012; Casciaro et al., 2015). And management research has made strides toward understanding the importance of relationships for achieving positive organizational outcomes (Casciaro and Lobo, 2008; Canales and Greenberg, 2015) such as relational coordination (Gittell, 2001, 2006). This work has unearthed important indicators of relationship quality, such as mutual respect and frequent communication, but it has not detailed the process through which beneficial relationships are formed. Scholarship on high-quality connections has taken a more process-based view of relationship formation at work (e.g., Dutton and Ragins, 2017) but has primarily examined relationships in which a relational foundation already exists (e.g., managers and their subordinates), unlike the case of peripheral experts.

One notable exception is work by Huising (2015), who found that experts can use “relational authority” with organizational members resistant to their recommendations by entering their workspaces and performing lower-status scut work (e.g., Ph.D.s changing lightbulbs in scientific laboratories). But even though Huising’s low-power experts formed relationships with line managers, this study did not explore how such relationships were built and maintained given the power asymmetry between them. And to my knowledge, no one has studied dyadic relationships between peripheral experts and line managers. Typically, only one group is studied (e.g., safety officers in Daudigeos, 2013; health physicists in Huising, 2015) because of the difficulty of securing dyadic data that attend to the point of view of both the line managers and peripheral experts and map their relations over time. Without data from both sides of the relationship, it is not possible to understand both which tactics influencers use and which tactics influence targets. And without mapping relations over time, it is not possible to understand timing and sequencing effects.

Temporality scholars remind us of the value of temporal sequencing: it may not only be what you do that matters, but when you do it (e.g., Perlow, 1999; Ancona, Okhuysen, and Perlow, 2001; Okhuysen and Bechky, 2009; Fisher, Pillemer, and Amabile, 2018). One temporal dimension that may be particularly important in the context of peripheral-expert relationship building is that of “windows of opportunity” (e.g., Tyre and Orlikowski, 1994). Temporality scholars have noted that critical windows of opportunity exist in many organizational domains, such as teamwork processes and technology adoptions. There is often a short initial period of time in which experimentation and multiple options for action are available, after which the window closes as interaction patterns solidify and become difficult to change (Weick, 1990; Gersick, 1994; Tyre and Orlikowski, 1994; Albert, 2013). Because peripheral experts often begin their encounters with line managers as discredited, and their recommendations are often viewed as provoking conflict, they may have a limited window of time to build a relational foundation to influence line managers before inevitable conflicts occur and doom the relationship. This literature also highlights the importance of taking early action since first impressions are quick to form and hard to change (e.g., Higgins, Rholes, and Jones, 1977).

Research Context

During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army encountered an unexpected increase in soldiers’ mental health problems, especially suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder (Department of Defense Task Force on Mental Health, 2007; Tanielian and Jaycox, 2008; de Rond and Lok, 2016). Between 2001 and 2011, mental health diagnoses across the military increased 65 percent (U.S. Armed Forces Surveillance Report, 2012). Of all the branches of the military, the army suffered the greatest increase in suicides and other mental health problems (Institute of Medicine, 2014). In response, Congress and the American public demanded the “invisible wounds” of mental illness be treated the same as physical injuries—by providing rehabilitative care services.

Prior to these wars, army mental health services were limited, and many soldiers hid their problems until they broke down and were then discharged from the army rather than sent to professional care to be rehabilitated and retained. Mental healthcare usage was strongly stigmatized as a sign of weakness in a hyper-masculine context in which soldiers are regularly evaluated on their physical and mental toughness (e.g., Vogt, 2011). In contrast, active-duty U.S. soldiers are now offered some of the most extensive rehabilitative mental healthcare services in the world, such as same-day walk-in access to mental health specialists, and they have the opportunity to recover from a mental health problem while remaining in the army just as if they had a physical injury, such as a broken bone. Billions of dollars have been invested into providing these services, including to hire hundreds of mental health professionals to provide this care to soldiers (Hoge et al., 2015; Srinivasan, DiBenigno, and Carroll, 2017).

To deliver these rehabilitative clinical care services, the army built a dedicated outpatient mental health clinic for every brigade, and in some brigades it assigned a mental health provider to serve soldiers in one or two units exclusively, working with ~6–12 commanders and their subunits. Online Appendix A (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0001839219827006) provides a visual representation of this structure. Army posts generally comprise three to six brigades located in different geographic areas, with approximately 3,600 soldiers in each brigade. Units within brigades comprise approximately 600 soldiers and are further broken into subunits of approximately 100 soldiers, each led by a different commander.

For soldiers to fully benefit from these extensive new services, they required the support of their direct supervisor—their subunit or unit commander (referred to simply as “commander” hereafter). Commanders could override and reject duty-limiting treatment recommendations made by mental health providers in support of their soldiers’ recoveries, such as recommendations to sit out a training exercise or deployment, restrict access to weapons, escort a soldier to an appointment, or adjust a soldier’s work schedule or duties.

Data Collection

I collected data between 2012 and 2015. For the first 12 months I did preliminary fieldwork, acquainting myself with the army context by serving as a research assistant on an interdisciplinary research team that conducted over 130 formal and informal interviews and dozens of focus groups with mental health providers, commanders, soldiers, chaplains, and other medical and command stakeholders at seven U.S. Army posts. I spent the next 18 months examining how mental health professionals—as members of the lower-power peripheral medical function of the organization—regularly elicited support from the commander line managers in the core war-fighting function of the organization, whose cooperation they needed to ensure their soldiers could recover from the mental health conditions they were receiving treatment for. I focused data collection on 18 mental health clinics and the 18 brigades they served across four U.S. Army posts.

As predicted by the literature, given their peripherality and lack of authority, the majority of mental health providers failed to build influential relationships with commanders. In 10 of the 18 clinics studied, both providers and commanders reported that commanders regularly did not follow providers’ recommendations for soldiers’ care. But I was surprised to discover that some providers were regularly building highly influential relationships with commanders in the other eight clinics. Given the empirical and theoretical puzzle posed by this unlikely success, I focused my analysis on data from these eight clinics, where I spent over 600 hours total on site and conducted an additional 183 in-depth interviews. These formal interviews were supplemented with observation, informal interviews, and participation in social gatherings.

Providers in these eight clinics were assigned to work exclusively with a small set of commanders and their subunits (~6–12 commanders). In the other ten clinics, providers were not assigned to specific commanders and worked with dozens of commanders, so they had few opportunities to develop familiarity, let alone influential relationships. In prior work, I showed how the organizational structure of assigning providers to specific commanders while working surrounded by each group’s professional colleagues helped alleviate intergroup goal and identity conflict by enabling personalized relationships between groups while preventing cooptation. But even within the more successful clinic structures with dyadic pairings of providers and commanders that promoted such “anchored personalization” (DiBenigno, 2018), there was variation in the extent to which providers developed influential relationships with commanders and got them to regularly follow their recommendations. This is because although assigning providers to specific commanders provided the opportunity for a personalized relationship to form, it did not guarantee it. In this paper, I analyze variation between providers who were able to build influential relationships with commanders and those who were not despite having similar clinic-level opportunity structures for such a relationship to form.

My sampling strategy involved interviewing mental health providers from a variety of backgrounds (Small, 2009) in all eight clinics―uniformed and civilian, psychologists and social workers, male and female, assigned to combat and to sustainment units, prior combat experience and no combat experience―as well as one to three commanders assigned to work with each of the providers in these clinics, so that I had data on pairs of providers and commanders. By interviewing both members of the dyad, I could then triangulate their accounts of the same situations and relational dynamics, as well as triangulate these accounts with those from other members of their clinic and brigade. In three cases, I did not interview both members of the dyad, but I was able to corroborate details of their relationship and whether the provider’s recommendations were followed or not by relying on another clinic team member or source. In total, I collected detailed data on 56 provider–commander dyads, as summarized in table 1. These semi-structured interviews spanned between one and three hours, with most lasting an hour. I recorded and transcribed all interviews when permission was granted; when it was not, I took extensive notes and typed them up within 24–48 hours. Interviews focused on four main areas: the interviewee’s background; the relational history of each provider–commander dyad; when conflict situations occurred and how they were addressed; and tactics and strategies providers used to build relationships with commanders and commanders’ reception of these tactics. I generally interviewed commanders first so that providers then focused their responses on their experiences with those specific commanders.

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Table 1.

Data Collection Summary

Data source	Army Post 1	Army Post 2	Army Post 3	Army Post 4
# of clinic providers interviewed	21 providers across 5 clinics	17 providers across 4 clinics	18 providers across 3 clinics	15 providers across 6 clinics
# of commanders interviewed	15 commanders across 5 brigades	24 commanders across 4 brigades	21 commanders across 3 brigades	12 commanders across 6 brigades
# of provider–commander dyads	14 dyads (10 providers, 14 commanders)	14 dyads (9 providers, 14 commanders)	19 dyads (10 providers, 19 commanders)	9 dyads (7 providers, 9 commanders)
# of interviews with other stakeholders	13	9	10	8
Total interviews for each post	49	50	49	35
Additional first-year fieldwork	132 interviews, 46 focus groups, and numerous informal meetings with hundreds of stakeholders from across seven army posts, including mental health providers, other providers (e.g., in-patient, substance-abuse, primary care, and embedded providers), chaplains, brigade surgeons, physicians assistants, soldiers, non-commissioned officers, and officers at all levels

Inductive Dyadic Data Analysis

I employed an inductive analysis approach (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), which consisted of reading and re-reading field and interview notes and writing analytical memos about relations between mental health providers and commanders. My analysis proceeded in three broad stages. In the first stage, I analyzed interview transcripts and field notes from my first 12 months of preliminary fieldwork. This analysis revealed the widespread theme of mental health providers facing challenges in eliciting cooperation―willingness to support and follow their treatment recommendations―from the commanders of the soldiers they were treating.

In the second stage, I focused on understanding how, despite these barriers, many providers developed highly influential relationships with commanders. I first coded provider and commander data separately and then coded them by provider–commander dyad for all dyads that had worked together for at least three months. I analyzed the relational history of the dyad from their first encounter through their most recent interactions, which included detailed accounts of conflicts and disagreements. Through this coding process, I identified numerous tactics providers used to try to build influential relationships with commanders. I noted a specific sequencing of these tactics: providers used some tactics immediately upon being assigned to a commander, some shortly afterward, and some during the remainder of the relationship. I also noted that some tactics seemed more effective than others. I coded each of the 56 dyads according to whether it was an example of a successful or failed influential relationship: a successful dyad was one in which both the provider and the commander reported that the commander regularly followed the provider’s recommendations. I noted a puzzling pattern: providers used many tactics in successful relationships that they also used in failed relationships.

In the third stage of analysis, I sought to understand why and paid special attention to the 63 percent of dyads for which I had data on the same provider working with multiple commanders. To do this, I mapped out the relational history of each of the 56 provider–commander dyads temporally to identify when providers used each tactic and whether the tactic was successful, according to both the provider and the commander, in building an influential relationship in which the commander regularly followed the provider’s recommendations. I found that there were three phases associated with a provider building an influential relationship: (1) gaining access to and knowledge of the commander, (2) gaining the commander’s trust, and (3) gaining and maintaining influence over the commander. I also noticed that particular tactics were useful in particular phases. Finally, by analyzing the relational history of the dyad, I noted that providers had short windows of opportunity in which to cultivate relationships with commanders. Early conflicts or the provider’s inability or unwillingness to use the phased tactics were associated with failure to build an influential relationship. I used these findings to create a process model of building influential relationships with line managers as a peripheral expert.

Peripheral Experts Lacked Formal Authority over Line Managers

Despite the army leadership’s support for and investment in mental health services, I observed that soldiers could not fully benefit from them when their direct commanders did not follow mental health providers’ treatment recommendations. As members of the medical support function, mental health providers lacked authority over the line commanders responsible for the soldiers they treated. This meant commanders could override their recommendations. Most providers quickly learned they were dependent on commanders for their soldier-care recommendations to be followed. One provider explained, “One of the things that I maybe didn’t realize until I got involved in doing this a little bit more is when I make a recommendation to the commander, that’s all that is, it’s a recommendation. The commander can choose whether or not they want to follow that recommendation.” Another provider noted the difficulty of getting in touch with commanders and getting them to follow his recommendations:

They’re hard to get ahold of, and when you get ahold of them, they either immediately agree to everything you say but then don’t follow through, or they tell you, “It’s not an issue. . . . The soldier’s lying to you. . . . He’s a stellar performer. . . . He’s the best we have. I don’t support the treatment. I don’t think he needs treatment.” So we have the overly agreeable who then don’t follow through and the ones that are just totally unsupportive.

Yet as all providers noted, commanders’ support for their recommendations was critical for soldiers’ recoveries. One provider explained, “I can say to the patient, ‘You need to get 8 hours of sleep’ and tell command that too. But if command puts you on a mission where you’re only getting 5 hours a night or are pulling 24-hour staff duty, there’s no way you’ll get the sleep you need to recover.”

Peripheral Experts’ Expertise Not Valued by Line Managers and Provoked Conflict

Providers’ mental health expertise and credentials were largely not valued by commanders, and their soldier-care recommendations regularly provoked conflict. With the exception of three commanders who were all receiving treatment for their own mental health problems, commanders started out with a negative view of the army’s mental health services. One provider explained, “Building credibility was absolutely the challenge, and we had none. In fact, we were in the negative. We were Mental Health. You are not to be trusted.” Providers were members of the lowest-status department in the medical organization as those who treated invisible rather than physical wounds. Providers were aware their expertise was not highly regarded. As one noted, “There’s also a negative perception of Mental Health. On the food chain of MEDCOM (the medical department), the lowest life form is Mental Health.”

Commanders generally viewed providers’ expertise and recommendations as interfering with their core line work of training mission-ready units and as threatening control over how they ran their units. One commander explained this frustration, turning red as he recalled a heated interaction with his assigned provider:

Do not try to threaten me by using big medical words. . . . The social worker told me how many days leave this guy needs! . . . I challenged it and said, “No,” and the social worker said he must have those days off or he will deteriorate. I’m like, “Let me do my job!” Granting leave is my decision.

The negative impression commanders had of providers and their recommendations was kept salient through an ongoing series of conflicts that regularly occurred between nearly all mental health providers and commanders. Given the nature of their work, providers regularly and inevitably made decisions and recommendations that commanders said inconvenienced or had a negative impact on their subunits. Providers primarily contacted commanders in four circumstances: (1) when a soldier’s mental health condition was serious enough to warrant a recommendation of a work modification or reduction, such as sitting out a stressful training exercise, deployment, or other duties; (2) when a soldier’s condition required the additional support and resources of the unit, such as escorts to appointments, restricted access to weapons, and additional supervision; (3) when requesting that a soldier not be punished for minor or major disciplinary infractions related to an underlying mental health condition; and (4) when a soldier’s mental health condition was serious enough to qualify them for a medical retirement or medical discharge from the army.

Commanders often resisted providers’ recommendations because they made it more difficult for them to meet their mission-readiness training targets when soldiers were taken “out of the fight” by missing work to attend appointments, sitting out trainings, or using resources from the unit that detracted from preparing for the mission. Commanders unable to meet their targets, which they were assessed on monthly, were relieved of command or not promoted. Providers were generally aware of the conflict and resistance their recommendations provoked. One provider shared, “They get upset. I think that sometimes that drives a wedge between command and the provider. Because command is looking at it as a mission thing. The provider is saying, ‘Hey, you have to do this, you have to do that.’ And they don’t like being told what to do.”

Peripheral Experts Seen as Outsiders Who Lacked Knowledge of Core Work

Providers were also disadvantaged by their peripheral position in the organization, far outside the social network of commanders in combat units. The mental health professionals―a mix of psychologists, licensed clinical social workers, and psychiatrists―were members of the support function of the army belonging to the Medical Department and reporting up to the army surgeon general. Their clinics were located close to the brigades they served, but given their high patient loads, providers had little time in their schedules to leave their clinics to see their soldiers or commanders in action at work. Given their peripherality, even providers with military backgrounds often lacked access that would help them understand the specific missions and daily work of the multiple commanders they worked with. Hence providers were often viewed as out-of-touch outsiders who did not understand the missions of their units or the army and thus were a threat to those missions. In part because of this lack of trust in providers’ understanding of military life, many commanders said they believed Mental Health was full of “shammers” and that the majority of soldiers seeking help were faking sick to get out of work or angling for an undeserved medical retirement and pension by duping what commanders considered naïve “Berkeley hippie” civilian providers. One noted:

Some guy got 80-percent benefits for lying his way through Mental Health, and it sickens me. It just sickens me. But what can you do? Can I hook them up to a polygraph? . . . If the guy comes in there and describes a made-up scene from a Hollywood movie to a civilian provider, the civilian provider is nodding her head saying, “I’m so sorry, honey.”

Peripheral Experts Shared Few Characteristics with Line Managers

Finally, mental health providers also faced barriers to eliciting cooperation from commanders because they had many characteristics that were devalued in this context and differed from those of most commanders, who were men under age 35. Online Appendix B provides a detailed demographic comparison. First, the majority of providers army-wide (~80 percent) were civilians rather than uniformed, active-duty providers (referred to as “green suiters”). In this context, civilians were considered untrustworthy outsiders. Even providers with prior military experience were not held in high regard if they had not deployed to a combat zone, which was the case for the majority of providers. One uniformed provider explained, “There is definitely a green suiter prejudice here. They talk about three levels of trust. You trust a green suiter with the patch [indicating they’ve deployed], then one without a patch, then a civilian.” Second, slightly over half of mental health providers were women in the male-dominated army in which femininity was demeaned as the polar opposite of the masculine warrior ideal. One commander explained the negative impression of his unit’s female uniformed provider who had not deployed: “You can read a uniform. She’s a green suiter, but she has not deployed, and she’s a female. She doesn’t have a lot going for her even though she wears the uniform. . . . And to make matters worse, when she started, she was pregnant.” While all providers were considered low status given their association with Mental Health, they varied on also being civilians and/or female. One female civilian provider noted, “I think you have a disadvantage when you’re a civilian and you’re a female and you’re Mental Health. Those are kind of three strikes against you. . . . I’m sort of so low on their totem pole it’s not even funny.”

Rapid Relationality Increased Peripheral Experts’ Influence over Line Managers

Nearly all providers started off “in the red” with their assigned commanders given the aforementioned barriers. With few exceptions, my interviews with provider–commander dyads corroborated that their relationships started off rocky given commanders’ initial low receptiveness to providers’ recommendations. Over time, however, most providers who had the opportunity to form relationships with their specific assigned commanders were able to achieve high levels of influence such that commanders regularly complied with their recommendations. Of the 56 provider–commander dyads analyzed, 64 percent of commanders regularly followed their assigned providers’ recommendations, as corroborated by both the commander and provider within the dyad. To understand this surprisingly high rate of success, I examined the tactics that led to success or failure across dyads in building these influential relationships, as well as their timing and sequencing. I call this process “rapid relationality.”

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Figure 1.

How peripheral experts use rapid relationality to develop a foundation for influence.

Through this rapid relationality process, a provider, despite lacking formal authority over the assigned commander, took advantage of a short initial window of opportunity to cultivate an influential relationship with the commander before conflict destroyed the chance for influence. As shown in figure 1, in the first phase, the provider used “rapidly getting in” tactics to gain access to and knowledge of the commander (or not). In the second phase, the provider used “rapidly proving oneself” tactics to gain the trust of the commander (or not). In the third phase, the provider continuously used “relational expertise” tactics to gain and maintain influence over the commander (or not) by minimizing the threat their recommendations posed. The first two phases occurred sequentially: a provider was unable to successfully use “rapidly proving oneself” tactics to gain the commander’s trust unless the provider had first used “rapidly getting in” tactics to gain access to and knowledge of the commander. In contrast, the third phase occurred continuously throughout the relationship. I have positioned it sequentially as the third phase because using “relational expertise” tactics in Phases I and II was insufficient for gaining access to, knowledge of, and trust with the commander, but not using these tactics after completing Phases I and II led to failure. The tactics listed in each phase in figure 1 are the most common ones providers successfully used to influence commanders, as corroborated by both providers and commanders and illustrated in table 2. Providers did not need to use all eight tactics across the three phases, but to be successful, they did need to use at least one tactic within each phase to achieve rapid relationality.

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Table 2.

Rapid Relationality Tactics by Phase

Phase I: Rapidly getting in
1. Preempting line manager’s concerns: “So at our first meeting . . . I’ve told them, ‘Look, I know what your perception of me is. You think that I’m in here with a rocking chair reading bedtime stories and breastfeeding them [soldiers]. That’s not what happens.’” (Civilian female provider) “It’s important to find a little time to get introduced. Then command can be more lenient on you contacting them, and feel at ease. . . . So having a relationship is important.” (Uniformed male provider)
2. Highlighting connections to the core: “If they give me any grief, I remind them that . . . I used to wear a uniform, and that ‘I know how the military works.’” (Civilian female provider)“My husband . . . deployed twice with [her assigned commander], and the First Sergeant deployed with my husband, so everybody knows his name. So that has helped a bunch.” (Civilian female provider)
3. Getting vouched for by the core: [A high-ranking uniformed provider] brought me over to meet with [the commander], and we sat down and had a discussion. . . . It’s definitely giving me an advantage. . . . I was able to hit the ground running here.” (Civilian female provider)“When I was working with [prior commander] he had told [new commander] . . ., ‘Hey, here’s your resource, he knows his stuff,’ so I had already kind of developed that rapport so that they know who I am before you get in there. So the old expression is first impressions last.” (Uniformed male provider)
Phase II: Rapidly proving oneself
4. Making a grand commitment gesture: “One of my guys [commanders]. . . . went into Iraq and took Fallujah . . . there’s a book written about it. . . . I read the book, and I told him and he’s like, ‘Oh whoa! . . . You went and you got that?’ You need to build that rapport and that relationship. . . . [I’m] the total lowest on their totem pole, so I need to prove my street cred anyway.” (Civilian female provider)“When I came in . . . I said I wanted to go to jump master school. . . . And that helped with my credibility. You could be a horrible clinician, but they will still love you if you have wings [a winged uniform badge indicating certification to help others jump out of airplanes].” (Uniformed male provider)
5. Regularly sacrificing for the core: “The best way to do it with command is just to be responsive to them. . . . They call me, and I call them back that same day. Even if it’s after hours, I call and leave a message so that they know that I’m responsive to them.” (Civilian female provider)“It’s just like any relationship. If I can go above and beyond and out of my way, they respond to that. . . . I’m going to earn your trust, and I’m going to follow through.” (Civilian female provider)
6. Maintaining existing jurisdictional boundaries: “That is not our lane. For example, I had a soldier . . . who said, ‘I came here because I want an appointment with my First Sergeant.’ Well that’s not Mental Health. I told them, ‘This is not something Mental Health does.’” (Uniformed female provider)“The last time I said, ‘That’s not a mental health issue. That’s a behavior [discipline] issue.’ . . . I’m like, ‘No, no. . . . There is no mental health disorder. . . . That’s not going in-patient [hospitalization].’ . . . [Maintaining] boundaries is a big thing.” (Uniformed female provider)
Phase III: Continuously using relational expertise
7. Privileging line manager’s culture: “Go formal until you’re invited to be informal. . . . If an 06 (Colonel) comes in, you stand. . . . If you stayed seated, they would be like, ‘whhhaaatt?!?!’” (Uniformed male provider)“I know it does sound so superficial, but to be able to talk, speak their [command’s] language, that’s the first thing you can do. You have to look up the acronyms.” (Civilian female provider)
8. Affirming line manager’s authority: “It’s important to let a commander be a commander. I am only an advisor. . . . Some providers don’t get that. . . . It’s as simple as using the words ‘this recommendation’ instead of saying ‘this service member will’ . . . so that you’re listened to.” (Uniformed male provider)“A piece of it is remembering that they, as the commander, are making a command decision. ‘Hey, this is the situation, and I’m sorry it’s a bad one. . . . What’s your decision, sir?’” (Civilian male provider)

Phase I: Rapidly Getting In

Providers were generally conscious of their lack of power and peripherality relative to the commanders whose soldiers they treated. Thus providers often attempted to “get in” with their assigned commanders in hopes of gaining regular access to and relational knowledge about them to gain commanders’ compliance with their recommendations. As depicted in table 3, in Phase I, providers in 79 percent of the provider–commander dyads successfully gained access to and knowledge of commanders, while providers in 21 percent of the dyads failed to do so. The providers in the successful dyads used three main tactics in Phase I: preempting a line manager’s concerns, highlighting connections to the core, and getting vouched for by the core. Providers in the Phase I failed dyads either did not have time to use these tactics before the first major conflict hit, typically within the first few weeks of working with the commander (58 percent of the Phase I failed dyads), or they were unable or unwilling to use these “getting in” tactics at all (42 percent of the Phase I failed dyads).

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Table 3.

Success and Failure of Rapid Relationality Tactic Usage by Provider Type*

	All		Female, Civilian		Male, Civilian		Female, Uniformed †		Male, Uniformed †
	#	%	#	%	#	%	#	%	#	%
Number of dyads	56	100%	25	45%	11	20%	11	20%	9	16%
Made through Phase I	44	79%	20	80%	7	64%	8	73%	9	100%
Made through Phase II	37	66%	18	72%	4	36%	7	64%	8	89%
Made through all 3 phases of rapid relationality§	35	63%	18	72%	4	36%	7	64%	6	67%
Failure due to early conflict	10	18%	5	20%	3	27%	1	9%	1	11%
Failure due to inability / unwillingness to use tactics	11	20%	2	8%	4	36%	3	27%	2	22%
Average # of tactics successfully used	3.7		3.8		2.1		3.8		5.4
Phase I: Successfully Used Rapidly Getting-in Tactics
Preempting line manager’s concerns	30	54%	18	72%	4	36%	3	27%	5	56%
Highlighting connections to the core	29	52%	8	32%	5	45%	7	64%	9	100%
Getting vouched for by the core	10	18%	1	4%	0	0%	3	27%	6	67%
Failure during Phase I	12	21%	5	20%	4	36%	3	27%	0	0%
Due to early conflict	7	58%	4	80%	2	50%	1	33%	0	N/M
Due to inability / unwillingness to use tactics	5	42%	1	20%	2	50%	2	67%	0	N/M
Phase II: Successfully Used Rapidly Proving Oneself Tactics ‡
Performing a grand commitment gesture	18	41%	10	50%	1	14%	4	50%	3	33%
Regularly sacrificing for the core	29	66%	15	75%	4	57%	4	50%	6	67%
Maintaining jurisdictional boundaries	27	61%	10	50%	2	29%	7	88%	8	89%
Failure during Phase II ‡	7	16%	2	10%	3	43%	1	13%	1	11%
Due to early conflict	3	43%	1	50%	1	33%	0	0%	1	100%
Due to inability / unwillingness to use tactics	4	57%	1	50%	2	67%	1	100%	0	0%
Phase III: Successfully Used Relational Expertise Tactics ‡
Privileging line manager’s culture	34	92%	18	100%	3	75%	7	100%	6	75%
Affirming line manager’s authority	32	86%	15	83%	4	100%	7	100%	6	75%
Failure during Phase III ‡	2	5%	0	0%	0	0%	0	0%	2	25%
Due to early conflict	0	0%	0	N/M	0	N/M	0	N/M	0	0%
Due to inability / unwillingness to use tactics	2	100%	0	N/M	0	N/M	0	N/M	2	100%

*

A “successful” use of a rapid relationality tactic is one in which the commander indicated that use of a particular tactic had a positive effect on their relationship (e.g., commanders mentioning how a grand commitment gesture changed how they saw the provider, mentioning being impressed by the provider’s knowledge of the army or their unit or by their connections to the army, etc.).

†

Includes uniformed Public Health Service providers.

‡

Percentages shown for Phase II and III are calculated as the % of providers who made it to Phase II and III, respectively.

§

The reason 35 dyads completed all three phases but 36 dyads had commanders who regularly followed recommendations (63% vs. 64%) is because one dyad contained a new provider who did not utilize rapid relationality tactics but was successful nonetheless because the commander was unusually supportive from the start from receiving treatment for a mental health condition himself.

Phase II: Rapidly Proving Oneself

Once providers had gained regular access to and knowledge of their assigned commanders, they deployed “proving oneself” tactics to gain their commanders’ trust. Providers in 84 percent (37 of 44) of the dyads who successfully made it through the first phase of developing an influential relationship also made it through the second phase. Providers in these successful Phase II dyads used three main tactics to gain trust: making a grand commitment gesture, regularly sacrificing for the core, and maintaining existing jurisdictional boundaries. Providers in the Phase II failed dyads either did not have time to use these tactics before the first major conflict hit (43 percent of the Phase II failed dyads) or were unable or unwilling to use such tactics (57 percent of the Phase II failed dyads).

Phase III: Continuously Utilizing Relational Expertise

Once providers had successfully proven themselves to their assigned commanders, they had key relational resources they could draw on as sources of power and influence: access to their commanders, knowledge of what their commanders valued, and trust. Nearly all commanders assigned to providers who had proven themselves regularly followed their providers’ recommendations. Yet these relationships remained asymmetrical, as providers had to do ongoing relational work to minimize the threat their recommendations posed and maintain their influence. Many providers employed tactics that emphasized their relational expertise, rather than clinical expertise, to address this challenge. Providers in 95 percent of dyads who successfully made it through the first two phases of developing an influential relationship also made it through the third phase. The successful providers used two primary tactics to maintain influence over commanders: privileging line managers’ culture and affirming line managers’ authority. Providers in the Phase III failed dyads did not use these relational-expertise tactics at all.

The Influence of Providers’ Characteristics on Achieving Rapid Relationality

While all providers faced barriers to developing influential relationships with commanders given their peripherality and lack of authority, providers varied in the baseline level of relational resources they had available to draw on based on their gender and status as uniformed versus civilian providers. These differences affected how long it took providers to go through all phases of rapid relationality before the window of opportunity closed for developing influence with commanders. While all successful providers went through all three phases of rapid relationality, providers with less valued characteristics in this context often faced greater barriers to getting in, proving themselves, and utilizing relational expertise―they had fewer tactics available to them or needed to use more extreme tactics to achieve the same level of influence as others.

Uniformed providers used more getting-in tactics than civilian providers, on average. This may be because civilian providers had fewer of these tactics available to them: many civilian providers had no one to vouch for them or had no connections to the core. Of dyads with female civilian providers, 72 percent successfully used preempting concerns as a tactic for getting in, 32 percent used highlighting connections to the core, and only 4 percent used getting vouched for. In contrast, in dyads with uniformed male providers, 56 percent used preempting concerns, 100 percent used highlighting connections to the core, and 67 percent used getting vouched for as tactics to get in with their assigned commanders. Table 3 summarizes the rapid relationality tactics successfully used by different types of providers.

Many uniformed providers, especially uniformed male providers, breezed through Phase I. As one male uniformed provider with a combat patch said, “As a uniformed provider, I have what we call ascribed credibility. . . . it’s the credibility people give you because you look like them. . . .” Civilian providers often took longer and hence were more often thwarted by conflict occurring before they had established a relationship, since commanders were more likely to ignore their requests for initial meetings given their reluctance to meet with or listen to a civilian. Providers with less valued characteristics exerted greater effort to prove themselves toward building an influential relationship, such as by employing more extreme and time-consuming tactics. Of all the “grand commitment gestures” successfully performed to prove oneself, 78 percent were performed by female providers―with 55 percent by civilian female providers. These gestures were often energy-intensive, required time away from home, or involved physical or mental suffering―for example, doing early morning exercises and pushups with the unit or spending the weekend at a training exercise sleeping on the floor. Fewer uniformed male providers, who had more valued characteristics in this context, employed such extreme gestures to prove themselves.

Different combinations of characteristics intersected to create varying levels of advantage or disadvantage for developing an influential relationship. Although masculinity was more valued in this context, many male civilian providers also faced barriers on account of their gender throughout all phases. Some civilian male providers perceived they were “held to a higher bar” than female civilian providers since they were expected to have mastery over the male-dominated army sphere. Some felt that female civilian providers received more leniency or a “pass” if they initially did not know proper army terminology, while civilian male providers felt penalized more for making the same mistakes. For example, one commander commented on how pleasantly surprised he was when his female civilian provider made an attempt to learn the proper ranks by hanging rank charts on her office wall: “I know she’s trying. I even saw a little printout she had up on her desk. She’s making an effort and it shows.” When civilian male and female providers performed similar grand gestures to prove themselves, those performed by civilian male providers often did not help them prove themselves with their assigned commanders. One commander gushed about how impressed he was by the commitment displayed by his female civilian provider after she showed up and attempted to do a few pushups at his unit’s early morning physical training (PT), noting, “[She] was doing PT with us and that really helps. Pushups and everything! Well, a few anyway! (Laughs) . . . It builds trust and in many ways, it broke down walls. . . . I have her on speed dial.” Few commanders commented on being impressed by their civilian male providers doing the same thing. One commander even commented that it was embarrassing that his male provider was so out of shape. This may help account for why 18 of the 25 dyads (72 percent) with female civilian providers made it through all three phases of rapid relationality but only 4 of the 11 (36 percent) dyads with male civilian providers were similarly successful.

Contributions to Our Understanding of Peripheral Experts’ Influence over Line Managers

This paper makes a number of contributions to our understanding of how experts in peripheral roles in organizations can influence line managers to support their work and comply with their recommendations. First, existing research on peripheral experts has primarily focused on documenting the numerous challenges they face (e.g., Dalton, 1950; Allen, 1955; Edelman et al., 1991), not how peripheral experts can successfully influence line managers―a striking gap given the prevalence of professionals working in organizations in this “age of experts” (Barley and Tolbert, 1991; Kellogg, 2014; Lifshitz-Assaf, 2018). The three-phase process model of rapid relationality helps to explain how and when peripheral experts can accomplish this difficult feat, suggesting they may need to cultivate alternative, relational sources of power by using tactics to quickly capitalize on critical windows of opportunity early in interactions with line managers to develop influential relationships with them before conflict strikes. This study also highlights the importance of temporality for cultivating influence, suggesting it is not only what experts do to exert influence over line managers, but also when and how quickly they do it, that matters. Windows of opportunity for building an influential relationship can be unpredictably short.

Second, the existing literature on peripheral experts’ influence has primarily conceptualized the main barriers to influence as rooted in both their lack of formal authority over line managers and the conflict and resistance provoked by their recommendations (e.g., Dalton, 1950; Meyer, 1968). This study suggests another important barrier—the lack of a basic relational foundation for influence between peripheral experts and line managers. Because they are not part of the core organization, peripheral experts do not always have easy access to line managers, accurate knowledge of core line managers’ work, or ways to easily establish trust with them. This lack of a relational foundation is due to peripheral experts’ positions of disadvantage in their organizations as untrusted outsiders with nonvalued expertise who share neither the line managers’ social networks at work nor their organizational culture. Yet relational forms of power may be especially important for peripheral experts to cultivate since other avenues of attaining power and influence are structurally closed off to them. In situations like these, rapid relationality may provide a means for peripheral experts to gain relational resources they can use to influence line managers.

Finally, while scholarship on peripheral experts has noted how a lack of shared characteristics can exacerbate already negative relations with line managers (e.g., Dalton, 1950), no one to my knowledge outside of small-group laboratory studies (e.g., Thomas-Hunt and Phillips, 2004) has examined how variation in individual experts’ characteristics may affect their influence over line managers. By leveraging a unique dataset with dyadic pairings of peripheral experts and line managers, I could discern differences introduced as a result of providers’ varying background characteristics. I found that peripheral experts with characteristics most valued by line managers generally had a greater number of influence tactics available to them and used less time- and energy-intensive tactics than experts without these characteristics. Prior research has examined peripheral experts and line managers as groups rather than in dyadic pairings and hence could not assess how variation in individual relational resources can affect influence. The rapid use of relational tactics may be especially important for experts with disadvantaging characteristics, who need to exert more effort and take faster action than others, since it may take them longer to cultivate relationality.

Contributions to Our Understanding of Influence by Low-power Groups in Organizations

This study also makes a number of contributions to scholarship on influence among low-power groups in organizations. While prior research on issue selling, low-power occupations, and upward influence has detailed a host of tactics and processes for attaining influence in organizations (e.g., Mechanic, 1962; Schilit and Locke, 1982; Ashford et al., 1998; Dutton et al., 2001; Kellogg, 2018), the peripheral experts studied here did not have basic access to, knowledge of, or a means by which to establish trust with line managers in daily work and thus had to employ different tactics focused on achieving these basic relational resources. Prior research has been conducted on influencers and targets who likely already have existing relationships or fairly easy ways to develop them. Middle-manager issue sellers, low-power core occupation members, and subordinates or peers in the same department as their influence targets generally have access to their targets because the influencers are typically already organizational insiders with social network connections to their targets. These influencers also generally already have nuanced knowledge of their targets because of their daily interactions engaging in core work with them. And these influencers often have the means by which to easily establish trust because they can prove their worth to their targets through the superior execution of core work. In addition, if influencers and targets are in the same occupation, they are likely to share similar demographic backgrounds, which can facilitate liking and trust (e.g., DiBenigno and Kellogg, 2014). Although a few studies on issue selling have examined what would qualify as peripheral experts (e.g., Howard-Grenville, 2007), a close read of these studies finds that influence occurred only after a relational foundation had been established, such as when former core members joined the peripheral expert group and leveraged prior relationships to exert influence. Peripheral experts, such as a new safety officer or sustainability specialist who has never worked in the industry, may require rapid relationality tactics to first build a relational foundation with line managers before they can exert influence. Prior scholarship on low-power influence has also not examined this earlier period of relationship formation, suggesting that it is an open empirical question whether any low-power influencer, not just those in peripheral expert roles, might also benefit from using rapid relationality tactics.

Next, prior scholarship on influence by low-power groups has largely portrayed influence tactics as universal, such that they can be utilized by nearly anyone (e.g., Dutton et al., 2001). This study suggests there may be limitations to this one-size-fits-all approach, as individuals may vary in the speed at which they can establish an influential relationship. Influencers with characteristics valued by their influence targets may have a greater initial level of relational resources they can use to more quickly build a relational foundation for influence. Unlike prior work, this study examines how the unique attributes of each peripheral expert affect which tactics are available to them and the level of effort required to build an influential relationship.

Consistent with scholarship that has found gender (dis)advantage to be context-specific (e.g., Turco, 2010; Ridgeway, 2011), I found that civilian female providers were generally more successful than male civilian providers, even though masculinity was more highly valued in this male-dominated context. There may be two reasons for this. First, commanders may have evaluated male providers using a higher bar, as many commanders viewed knowledge of the army as something any “real man” should possess. Second, male providers may have been less willing and able than female providers to deploy some of the rapid relationality tactics. Since women often operate from lower-power and lower-status positions in society (e.g., Ridgeway and Smith-Lovin, 1999; Doering and Thébaud, 2017), they may be more accustomed to, and possibly more skilled at, utilizing relational forms of power to strategically achieve influence over higher-power others (e.g., Williams and Dempsey, 2014).

This study also extends our understanding of issue-selling processes in organizations. The greatest overlap between issue-selling moves and the tactics described here is in the third phase of rapid relationality, in which providers used relational expertise to maintain their influence and minimize the threat they posed by deferring to and affirming the culture and authority of the dominant commander group. In this third phase, the providers used issue-selling packaging moves such as strategic framing and tapping into the cultural values and schemas most cherished by the dominant group (Dutton et al., 2001; Howard-Grenville, 2007). The tactics elaborated in this paper in the other two phases of rapid relationality do not overlap with those detailed in the issue-selling literature. This difference is likely because scholars have not examined this early period in which peripheral experts first need to establish a relational foundation for influence (going through the getting-in and proving-oneself phases) before they can effectively use the kinds of tactics described in the issue-selling literature. My findings contribute to our understanding of issue selling by elaborating an additional set of tactics that may be necessary for issue sellers who are in peripheral positions in their organizations without alternative ways of acquiring relational assets (e.g., Howard-Grenville, 2007), a situation that is becoming more common as the use of experts in organizations continues to grow (e.g., Anteby, Chan, and DiBenigno, 2016).

This study also advances our understanding of scholarship on upward influence tactics, which has focused nearly exclusively on what people do (e.g., Kipnis, Schmidt, and Wilkinson, 1980; Falbe and Yukl, 1992; Farmer et al., 1997; Bruins, 1999) and the factors affecting whether an influence attempt succeeds, such as the organizational context, skill of the influencer, and characteristics/receptiveness of the target (e.g., Schilit and Locke, 1982), rather than on when they do it. These factors were largely held constant, however (e.g., same context, providers all skilled as clinicians at influencing behavior, nearly all targets initially resistant), and I observed variation in influence effectiveness. This may be because existing scholarship has not focused on the speed or temporal sequencing of deploying influence tactics. Applying a temporal lens to influence may help explain the mixed findings on the efficacy of various influence tactics in prior studies (e.g., Higgins, Judge, and Ferris, 2003). Whether certain influence tactics are effective may depend on whether one has first gotten in and proven oneself in their relationship with their specific influence target. Since most studies of influence tactics are survey-based and cross-sectional, few have data on the relationship history between the influencer and target over time, and they do not attend to temporal sequencing.

Contributions to Our Understanding of Relationality in Organizations

The relational turn in the social sciences has yielded a substantial body of scholarship on the value and importance of relationships, relationality, and social capital (e.g., Granovetter, 1973; Coleman, 1988; Emirbayer, 1997; Gittell, 2001, 2006; Dutton and Heaphy, 2003; Heaphy et al., 2018). Yet surprisingly little work has examined how work relationships are actually formed, particularly when asymmetrical power relations exist between ties. Scholars of social networks have found that attributes such as proximity, homophily, and likeability predict the likelihood of a relationship forming (e.g., for a review, see Rivera, Soderstrom, and Uzzi, 2010) but have not told us how these relationships develop and get off the ground. Work on relational coordination has highlighted how critical relationships characterized by frequent communication, mutual respect, and shared knowledge and goals are for achieving valued organizational outcomes (e.g., Gittell, 2001, 2006) but has not yet identified the micro-processes underlying how these relationships are built. And while positive organizational scholars have proposed practices and processes for building high-quality connections at work, the processes identified, such as respectfully engaging by being present and genuine, apply to existing relationships with a foundation that peripheral experts lack (e.g., between managers and their subordinates in the same department, administrative assistants and their assigned faculty members, etc.) (Dutton and Heaphy, 2003; Dutton and Ragins, 2017). Finally, recent studies of professionals working inside organizations suggest they may need to deploy “relational authority” and “relational expertise” (Huising and Silbey, 2011; Huising, 2015; Sandefur, 2015) to get their work done, rather than rely solely on their professional expertise, yet do not specify the process through which the relationships underlying these forms of authority are built. This study begins to fill this important gap by identifying the three-stage process of rapid relationality through which one important type of organizational relationship can be cultivated: between peripheral experts and core line managers.

Limitations and Opportunities for Future Research

The theory developed here should be considered in light of the following boundary conditions and limitations. First, one unique feature of the organizational context I studied is that the peripheral expert providers were explicitly assigned to work in dyads with line manager commanders, such that the opportunity for forming a relationship existed in a way that it may not for other peripheral experts. A dyadic pairing may be an important enabling condition for rapid relationality that helps explain why prior scholars of peripheral expert influence have not observed much successful influence. Creating such dyadic pairings is something many organizations could plausibly replicate to enable the opportunity for relationships to develop between line managers and peripheral experts (DiBenigno, 2018). Yet creating dyadic pairings was not sufficient for an influential relationship to develop—utilizing rapid relationality tactics to quickly build a relationship before conflict occurred was also necessary. Future research should examine other ways that a relational foundation for influence may be achieved and enabled.

Second, future research is needed to examine the extent to which rapid relationality occurs in other contexts with other groups. I would expect this process to be most relevant to other situations in which an occupational group lacks not only formal authority but also a relational foundation of access to, knowledge of, and trust from their influence targets. This likely encompasses those in roles considered peripheral to the core mission of the organization such that their expertise is not valued or is considered threatening, who are removed from the daily work and social networks of core line managers, and who have low status relative to line managers. For example, sustainability and diversity officers might benefit from using rapid relationality tactics to develop influential relationships with line managers, especially when first joining an organization. I would also expect the extent to which one’s individual characteristics are valued by line managers to affect how difficult building rapid relationality will be. While gender and military status were important characteristics that affected how easily the mental health experts in this study built influential relationships with line manager commanders, in other settings, different characteristics that are valued by or similar to one’s influence targets may matter most (e.g., youth in the start-up world). Other peripheral groups—be they safety managers, internal consultants, or cybersecurity experts—may find it beneficial to use rapid relationality to build influential relationships, though future research is needed to test this theory in other domains.

Finally, future research is needed to examine rapid relationality under other conditions. The length of the window of opportunity for establishing a relationship in other settings may vary, especially if peripheral experts have greater control over when conflicts arise or more opportunities for failure and second chances. Other peripheral experts may face similar unpredictable conflict timelines. For instance, cybersecurity professionals typically have no control over when hacks occur, potentially creating conflict with organization members by disrupting their work with computer updates and patches.

Implications: The Dark Side of Rapid Relationality

My elaboration of the micro-process of rapid relationality helps build theory on how and when low-power peripheral experts can influence line managers in core functions. But there are a number of macro, system-level implications of this process that speak to a potential dark side of rapid relationality for what it reveals about power and the capacity for change in organizations. While rapid relationality tactics can lead to line managers complying with peripheral experts’ recommendations, the way in which this compliance is achieved requires peripheral experts to conform to the dominant organizational power and status structure. By engaging in rapid relationality, they may be reinforcing the very system that disadvantages them, potentially limiting more radical change in the organization’s culture and power structure.

Even when top managers in organizations invest in bringing in experts to promote change, such experts are often sidelined and appear as window dressing (e.g., Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Westphal and Zajac, 2001; Tilcsik, 2010). This study suggests yet another reason why organizations tend toward inertia and the decoupling of the rhetoric around change used by top managers from the reality of on-the-ground practices. Even when a particular expert group is not sidelined and learns creative ways to effectively get line managers to heed their expertise, how they achieve this influence—by aligning with rather than challenging or subverting the dominant cultural values and organizational power structure—may limit the extent of change in the underlying organizational culture and hierarchy that is part of the problem. These findings are consistent with others that have found internal social activists can drive change by framing it in ways that resonate with their organization, but this may temper the radicalism of their efforts given organizational constraints and activists’ dependency on their organization for employment (Heinze and Weber, 2015; Briscoe and Gupta, 2016).

In addition, the fact that these experts are devoting significant amounts of time and energy to building relationships, rather than utilizing the technical expertise for which they were ostensibly hired, suggests the potential for system-level organizational losses from rapid relationality. It also highlights the asymmetrical nature of relationship building across power divides where the lower-power party performs the majority of relational work, with the higher-power party often oblivious to the behind-the-scenes strategic time- and labor-intensive tactics being utilized. But this time and energy may be well spent if it results in important protections for vulnerable employee groups that experts may be acting on behalf of, as in the case presented here. For those groups, peripheral experts’ early use of rapid relationality tactics may prevent them from becoming victims of conflict between the experts and their own superiors. As organizations continue to turn to expert professional groups to solve pressing problems, it is imperative we understand the processes through which these peripheral experts can effectively influence line managers.