Do Structurai Social Capital And Relational Social Capital Function As Substitutes Or Complements

The construct of social capital has attracted significant academic attention for decades. Despite so many efforts to examine the nature, role, and development of social capital in the organization studies, this field of study remains fragmented, without a constructive integration of empirical results across the multitude of studies because of different views and perspectives. How the mechanisms of social capital operate in different contexts with different cultural norms also remains largely unexplored.This paper firstly reviews amounts of papers in social capital area ranging from1990to2012, then we ultimately collect142independent samples reported in137studies talking the connection between social capital and organizational performance; after coding original sample, we employ meta-analysis and structural equation model to test our hypotheses.The result indicates that relational social capital functions as complements to structural social capital in predicting financial performance but structural social capital functions as substitutes to relational social capital in predicting focal innovative performance. We also found the cultural and network variations in the effect of structural capital o relational capital. These conclusions may contribute as a basis for further study in the area of social capital and company’s decision for the investment in social network.