| dc.description.abstract | With the recent trend of flattening organizations and increased task complexity, social capital has been increasingly popular in social sciences, such as management, economics, and psychology. The overarching purpose of this dissertation was to examine the impact of social capital manifested in South Korea in order to gain a holistic understanding of social capital and its benefit to both individuals and organizations. This dissertation was presented in the two-article format. In Chapter II (Article 1), I conducted a systematic review of literature on social capital in the South Korean context. Specifically, this review provided an overview of different conceptualizations of social capital as documented in the 57 empirical studies identified. Further, this review shed light on the methodological issues (e.g., measurements and methodological quality) that exist in current social capital research and mapped out the nomological network of social capital research by incorporating all prior empirical evidence.
Based on the conceptualizations and research trends identified in Chapter II, Chapter III (Article 2) extended the prior social capital and HRD literature by exploring the role of social capital in facilitating individual and organizational success. Specifically, the purpose of this Chapter III was to examine the relationships among social capital, subjective career success, organizational knowledge sharing, career adaptability, psychological ownership, and perceived supervisor support. In this quantitative study, a total of 522 responses from employees working for large corporations in Korea were collected using online survey panel. I adopted a survey research design with a social network data collection method and used structural equation modeling to analyze the collected data. These analytical research methods led to five major findings. First, there was a positive relationship between social capital and both subjective career success and organizational knowledge sharing. Second, there was positive relationships between social capital and career adaptability and psychological ownership. Third, there was no indirect effects of social capital via career adaptability and psychological ownership. Fourth, perceived supervisor support moderated the relationship between social capital and career adaptability. And finally, the indirect effect of social capital on subjective career success via career adaptability was stronger for those employees who perceive higher supervisor support.
The most prominent theoretical contribution of this study is that the findings lend empirical support to the idea that social capital fosters individual and organizational success and growth. In addition to individuals’ attributes and characteristics, this study highlights the importance of interpersonal relationships and informal networks in obtaining and utilizing a diversity of resources and information for individual and organizational success. Another significant contribution of this finding is that leaders play a vital role in further strengthening the positive impact of social capital. Given that leaders have control and authority over important resources and opportunities in the workplace, human resource development (HRD) professionals should seek ways to strike a balance between formal (e.g., leader-follower relationship) and informal (e.g., social capital) networks to pave the way toward continuous growth and competitive advantage of individuals and organizations. | en |
