Who really makes the changes in an organization? It's not always the people with the highest executive titles. A growing body of research has pointed to the importance of informal leaders known as "brokers," who have the gift of connecting employees in productive new ways. New research by Professor Brands has uncovered bias surrounding brokerage roles. Professor Brands examined what are known as "friendship networks" within organizations. In this sense, friends are the people you turn to for help, advice, and information, whether or not they are in your work group. Simply put, you like and trust them. It's within these friendship networks that much of an organization's work gets done. In a study of two separate groups–employees of an electronic-components distributor and a cohort of M.B.A. students–she identified brokers based on the high level of connectivity they displayed. They also identified the people who were perceived by their colleagues to be brokers. Researchers asked members to evaluate their colleagues, including the actual and perceived brokers. This is where gender differences emerged. The researchers found that people tended to ignore the activities of female brokers and to exaggerate how much men served as brokers. If women were recognized as brokers, they were perceived more negatively. "They incurred reputation penalties," Professor Brands says. "They were seen as more competent, but less warm." Other research, she says, has shown that men who take on brokerage roles tend to receive benefits in the form of compensation and promotions, whereas female brokers' careers are negatively affected. Professor Brands also analyzed the performance of the brokers' teams. They found that women who were thought by their teams to be brokers tended to perform well individually, but at the expense of their overall team's performance. The professors noted that men are traditionally defined by words like aggressive, forceful, independent, and decisive. Women are expected to be kind, helpful, sympathetic, and concerned about others. Women are thought to excel in the social realm–so you would think that they would be seen as good work brokers, the researchers said. But "despite the widespread notion of women as social specialists, perceptions of the network position of women will be distorted because of the expectation that brokerage is man's work," they wrote.