Organizational Success and The Concept of Social Capital

Because of its focus on building and nurturing professional relationships to create a chain of information, contact, and networking and the concept of social capital has become critical for individual as well as organisational success.

In today’s fast paced, global, high-tech environment, one’s willingness to, and comfort with networking can notably impact one’s ability to establish contacts, obtain job interviews, and identify and foster mentors. Networking is a specific career competency critical in this era of boundaryless careers. The current research defines networking as behaviours that are aimed at building, maintaining, and using formal and informal relationships that contain the potential benefit to facilitate work related activities by willingly granting access to resources and maximizing common advantages (Forret & Dougherty 2004).

Individuals try to build and maintain networks by calling and visiting people, socialising at meetings, engaging in social activities, doing favours, providing mentoring and advice and or engaging in informal conversation (Michael & Yuk 1993). This is not an end in itself, but a resource, which is critical for individual as well as organisational success.

Networking

Networking is distinct from social capital, which focuses on the quality and extent of existing relationship constellations (Adler & Kwon, 2002; Seibert, Krainer & Liden, 2001), which will be discussed in turn. Networking however is an individual level construct and focuses on individual behaviour.

Networking represents proactive attempts by individuals to develop and retain relationships with others for the purpose of mutual benefits in their work or career (Forret & Dougherty 2001). Networking as a career management stra...

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...rerequisite for organisational learning, adaptability and agility.

Conclusion

An organisation is made up of individuals and groups who work collaboratively and establish and maintain both trust-based relationships and a network of contacts. Organisations that recognise and incorporate social capital as an input into their operations will have an advantage over their competitors who cannot. Organisations compete in complex environments that are technically demanding, information sensitive and require coordination among different actors and different stages of their operations. It is assumed that social capital can make significant contribution to organisational performance by providing access to information and reducing contracting and coordination costs. Failure to recognise and explicitly incorporate the concept as an input may limit organisational performance