The Effect of Social Capital on Knowledge Sharing and Intellectual Capital

Abstract

Social capital is one of the new concepts that has more important role than human capital and physical capital in organizations and communities and today it has been used widely in sociology and economics and more recently in management and organizations. Social capital is a multidimensional concept. Different researches has identified three dimensions for social capital which are cognitive capital, relational capital and structural capital. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship among social capital, knowledge sharing and intellectual capital. This is an applied research in term of goal, and also descriptive survey research in terms of the method. Statistical population of this paper consists of all Maskan bank employees in the Esfahan city. For collecting data we use questionnaire and Finally 119 questionnaires were collected. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed to test the research model. According to the results, the two dimensions of social capital, the relational and cognitive capital, have significant and positive effect on knowledge sharing, but the effect of structural capital on knowledge sharing is not significant. The effect of knowledge sharing on three dimensions of intellectual capital wich are structural, human and relational aspects is positive and significant.The findings of this research will lead to better understanding of social capital and knowledge sharing mechanism, that can be acceptable basis for increasing the intellectual capital in organizations.

Keywords

• social capital
• knowledge sharing
• intellectual capital
• maskan bank