Measuring Social Capital and its influence on Individual Performance

Studies on social networks highlight the importance of network structure or structural properties of a given network and its impact on performance outcome. One of the important properties of this network structure is referred as “social capital” which is the “network of contacts” and the associated values attached to these networks of contacts. In this study, the aim is to provide empirical evidence of the influence of social capital and performance within the context of academic collaboration (co-authorship). This study suggests that the collaborative process involves social capital embedded within relationships and network structures among direct co-authors. Thus, association between scholars’ social capital and their citation-based performance measures is examined. To overcome the limitations of traditional social network metrics for measuring the influence of scholars’ social capital within their co-authorship network, the traditional social network metrics are extended by proposing two new measures of which one is non-weighted (Power-Diversity Index: “h-index of co-authors’ h-indices”) and the other is weighted (Power-Tie-Diversity Index) by the number of collaboration instances. The Spearman correlation rank test is used to examine the association between scholars’ social capital measures and their citation-based performance. Results suggest that research performance of authors is positively correlated with their social capital measures. This study highlights that the Power-Diversity Index and Power-Tie-Diversity Index serve indeed as indicators of power and influence of an individual’s ability to control and influence communication and information in

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