Leadership, Social Influence and Network Dynamics: Lessons from the Dance Floor

Social influence is a key factor in strategic decision making to explain how beliefs, innovations and social norms diffuse and sustain the evolution of organizational forms. We study the network of co-presences and social ties to control for the effect of social influence on contract renewal decisions in a dance club. We monitor the attendance behaviour of dance club members over four years by means of RFID and analyze it through a methodology currently applied in ethology. We find that central nodes are highly stable in the network and the level of commitment of the reference group of co-members significantly impacts on renewal decisions. We discuss how our results can be use to improve customer retention and firm performance in the service sector