During the second half of the 13th century, Florentine influence, benefiting from close ties with the Angevins and the papacy, prospered in the kingdom of Sicily.
Meat producers displayed similar interlinkages between the control and influence benefits.
Just like for knowledge-based benefits, trust seems to play an important role for establishing received ties in order to gain social influence benefits.
Formally stated: With respect to social influence benefits, firms aiming to establish a broad sphere of influence on external stakeholder are more likely to create undirected interlocks.
Thus, we suggest: With respect to social influence benefits, firms aiming to exert direct influence on another firm are more likely to create sent interlocks.
Moreover, general costs of sent interlocks such as the higher efforts required for their creation and time constraints mentioned above may offset their social influence benefits.
Social influence benefits of received interlocks can best be explained by the mechanism of inter-organizational co-optation (Allen 1974; Selznick 1949).
Based on the above arguments, we state: With respect to social influence benefits, firms aiming to exert indirect influence on other firms by means of co-optation are more likely to create received interlocks.
Social influence benefits reflect companies' use of inter-board ties as an instrument to exert control and influence on other companies and their upper echelons and gain their support (e.g., D'Aveni 1990; Mizruchi and Bunting 1981).
Sent interlocks offer particularly knowledge-based and social influence benefits that firms cannot realize via received and undirected interlocks, but are in general costlier and more difficult to establish.
