____________________________________________ Kenneth G. Brown ii To my mom and dad, you are my best assistants and supporters for my life and research. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are so many people I would like to thank for accompanying me through the hardest and happest days in the doctoral program. My thesis supervisors Ning Li and Scott Seibert are on the top of the list. Ning is a great teacher, best coauthor, and dearest friend of mine. He gives me the biggest freedom to pursue academic

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... osity. At the same time, he is always there when I need help. Scott is extremely smart, knowledgable, creative, and open to new ideas. I really appreciate the detailed and timely comments that he has provided for every single version of my drafts. He is such a great mentor and always challenges me to be more rigorous in my work. I am also very grateful to my committee: Maria Kraimer, Ernest O'Boyle, and Ken Brown. Maria has been a caring mom to me. She takes time to follow up with my dissertation and job search process, and "forces" me to submit my drafts on time to my chairs. Ernest is another person to whom I owe a great deal. My first first-author JAP cannot be completed without his guidance. He has inspired me tremendously in the way of thinking methodology. Ken is one of my favorite professors because he is always my source of positive energy and motivation. I feel extremely blessed to be able to meet and hang out with the amazing faculty members and students from the Management & Organizations department. Amy Kristof-Brown saw me before I self realized my passion to research methodology. She also provided enourmous help to shape my third year paper. I will also miss the time exchanging emails with Sara Rynes when I struggled with writing in the midnight. My PhD cohort and office mates are my constant source of joy, gossip and inspiration. I wouldn't have a more amazing life and coffee without any of you being part of it. iii ABSTRACT Team norms are one of the most frequently used explanations of how teams as a collective entity can influence individual member's behaviors (Hackman & Walton, 1986; Bettenhausen & Murnighan, 1991; Feldman, 1984) . Despite such importance, current theoretical and empirical development of team norms is relatively inadequate. In this dissertation, I view norm strength and norm enforcement as two central pillars of team norms, and specifically examine team norm enforcement from a social network perspective. I first develop a typology based on the existing literature and specify the behavior content of three types of norm enforcement mechanisms: sanction, recognition, and learning. Second, I examine the impact of the structural and configural properties on team performance. This model was tested on 799 employees nested in 101 work teams from China. Results from the data analysis have offered partial support that the structural characteristics of norm enforcement network had impacts on team performance above and beyond norm strength. iv PUBLIC ABSTRACT Team norms are the most frequently argued mechanism of how teams as a system can regulate and influence individual member's behaviors. Previous research has focused exclusively on team norms as a shared understanding of some informal rules, but issues related to how norms are enforced have received few attentions. Team norm enforcement refers to the processes through which individual behaviors are modified according to a set of actions informally specified as proper or improper by team members. My dissertation looks at team norm enforcement from a social network perspective by treating the enforcement activities as a type of social interactions between two individuals. First, I identified three main norm enforcement mechanisms: sanction, recognition, and learning. Secondly, I examined how the different structural characteristics of norm enforcement networks, such as the number of enforcement ties or the extent to which those ties are centralized on a few individuals, can impact on team performance. I collected data from 799 members from 101 work teams in China to empirically test this model. Results showed that the behavioral process of enforcing norms through feedback seeking and behavioral modeling is more important to team success than having a shared understanding of norms.