Engineering Opportunity: A Longitudinal Field Experiment Reveals How Convergent Versus Divergent Network Exposure Influences Social Belonging, Network Trajectories, and Career Attainment

Social belonging is a fundamental human need that people seek in the workplace. While traditional approaches to engendering belonging focus on mindset interventions, the authors instead develop a novel structural intervention that fosters belonging by altering opportunity structures for interaction. They distinguish between two forms of exposure to unfamiliar colleagues: convergent (within the same network community) and divergent (across communities). In a longitudinal field experiment at a non-profit organization (N=213), participants were randomly assigned to convergent or divergent groups for a professional development experience. Convergent exposure produced greater group solidarity and, three months post-intervention, more persistent ties and greater social belonging. Conversely, divergent exposure moved participants to structurally advantaged positions of lower constraint and greater centrality, resulting in faster promotion rates. Using a ground-truth network survey, digital trace data, and computational linguistics, the authors reveal a fundamental tradeoff: While even a brief experience of convergent exposure provides persistent psychological benefits, a comparable experience of divergent exposure produces enduring structural advantages that support career attainment.