A relational perspective on pure project performance: Network centrality and cinematic achievements in the Hong Kong film industry

Purpose: The understanding of leaders’ network centrality in social networks has been acknowledged as a major topic that can advance the social network field; most studies in this area have either taken firms as the subject by which the network centrality of firms was measured or/and have been conducted for the functional project context. Very little research has been done in the pure project context. This paper aims to revisit the centrality–performance link in the singular specialized project context. Design/methodology/approach: The proposed relationships using panel data on 48 movie directors who lead pure projects has been studied. Freeman’s (1979) and Wasserman and Faust’s (1994) procedures have been adopted to compute our three centrality measures and their effects have been examined on box-office and artistic performance. A random effect and a mixed-effects Poisson model have been fit to examine the significance of the centrality–performance relationship. Findings: The findings provide empirical evidence to support three out of the six hypotheses. The findings suggested that degree and closeness centrality are positively related to commercial performance and betweenness centrality is negatively related to commercial performance. However, it was found that only the degree centrality is related to artistic performance. Originality/value: This study has two features that distinguish it from prior studies that link centrality to performance. First, the focus is on centrality attached to the leaders instead of the centrality attached to functional project teams or firms, as previously investigated. Second, this study is the first attempt of its kind to analyse the proposed relationship for an Asian market.