We’ve all heard that professional networking is important. Building and sustaining connections can help you find your next job–or your next hire–and it keeps you informed about what’s happening in your organization or industry.

Even if we can all agree on its value, there’s a wide range of opinions on whether networking is enjoyable or, rather, downright icky.

Today we’re going to dive into some research that helps explain this wide range of opinions—and if you’re in the “no thanks” camp, we’ll look at what can be done to get over that hurdle.

How to Make Networking Feel Less Icky

Maryam Kouchaki, an associate professor of management and organizations, is interested in the ick factor that many of us feel while networking. So she and coauthors explored where that feeling comes from and found that networking can make people feel morally impure.

For example, in one study, participants saw partial words that could either be completed with a word related to cleanliness or an unrelated word (S _ _ P could be “soap” or “step”). They found that participants who had been asked to recall an instance of professional networking were more likely to fill in cleansing-related words than participants who had recalled forging a personal connection.

But not everyone experiences networking the same way. And those differences can help explain our networking preferences. Kouchaki and her colleagues asked a group of lawyers about their personal networking patterns. The researchers found that lawyers who felt dirtier after networking tended to do it less often—and had fewer billable hours.

So what can be done to combat this feeling of impurity? In another paper, Kouchaki and the same colleagues examined how the lens through which people view their networking can alter how they feel about it.

Across several studies, they found that the more people viewed networking as a way of achieving a goal (as opposed to a way of preventing negative professional consequences), the less troubled by networking they felt, and the more likely they were to actually do it. So if you can shift the way you’re thinking about networking, you could get yourself past the ick factor.

“Think about networking as an opportunity rather than a burden,” Kouchaki advises. “That’s the biggest hurdle you need to overcome.”

You can read more about Kouchaki’s research here and here.

Who Dislikes Networking the Most?

Kouchaki’s studies revealed one group of people with a particular aversion to networking—those who see it as a burden. But do other groups also feel this way?

A separate Kellogg study looked at why seasoned professionals seem to be more comfortable actively reaching out to their networks for favors and working meet-and-greet events than their more junior colleagues. In some sense, this is surprising: after all, more junior professionals often stand to gain the most from networking. This paradox was the impetus for research by the late Ned Smith, who was an associate professor of management and organizations, and coauthor Jiyin Cao, at Stony Brook University, who earned her PhD from Kellogg.

“We sensed this disconnect between who actually needs to be doing the networking behavior the most, and who is actually doing the networking behavior the most,” Cao says.

Smith and Cao explored why this is the case. First, they confirmed that higher-status people have larger networks and are more likely to work to broaden those networks. But, critically, they found that the differences between low- and high-status individuals wasn’t driven strictly by their professional seniority. Instead, it was more dependent on whether individuals considered status to be an indicator of someone’s quality. When people attributed their own high status to their talent and hard work, they were particularly eager to network because they were confident they had value to offer and that others would be receptive to their outreach.

“Higher-status people think, ‘I’m not just networking; I’m offering value to you,’” Cao explains. “They don’t feel like they’re taking advantage of their networking partner, which makes them come across as more authentic.”

You can read more about this study here.

TODAY’S LEADERSHIP TIP

“Sales leaders cannot simply ‘outsource’ the analytics to the data team or to some technology tool and hope for the best.”

—Clinical associate professor Joel Shapiro inForbes, on why sales leaders must have a vision for how to use analytics.