An empirical study of the influence of social capital on organization effectiveness in knowledge-intensive firms: an organizational knowledge exchange environment perspective

Abstract

There is a growing need to understand how social capital assists or impedes organizational performance. In particular, the success of organization networks has spawned new conjectures about the competitive advantage of social forms of organization relative to market-based exchange systems. The application of social capital to intra-organizational contexts has seen an explosion of interest in the past several years. We find that the network or structural perspective not only adds explanatory power to organizations' behavior and effectiveness, but also expands the applicability of organizational socialization from a traditional autonomous to a relational view for studying and explaining organizational action and outcomes. Weare developing an organizing framework based on both organizational and individual levels of network analysis to discuss with a description of social capital and the different levels to conceptualize it.