Social capital and knowledge sharing in academic research teams
| Author | Petra De Saá-Pérez,Nieves L. Díaz-Díaz,Paola García-Sánchez |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0020852316689140 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Review of
Administrative
Article
Sciences
International Review of
Administrative Sciences
2019, Vol. 85(1) 191–207
Social capital and knowledge
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sharing in academic research DOI: 10.1177/0020852316689140
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Paola Garcı´a-Sa´nchez
Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain
Nieves L. Dı´az-Dı´az
Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain
Petra De Saa´-Pe´rez
Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain
Abstract
The purpose of this article is to analyse the role of social capital within academic
research teams and its influence on knowledge sharing. An empirical study was carried
out with 87 academic research teams at a Spanish university. The results show that
internal ties have a positive effect on trust. Moreover, the results also reflect that both
dimensions of social capital (internal ties and trust) have a positive and significant effect
on research teams’ knowledge sharing. Therefore, the findings reveal that the network’s
structure has a positive influence on the quality of relationships among academic
researchers that favour knowledge sharing.
Points for practitioners
The results provide universities’ managers with a better understanding of internal social
capital in academic research teams, which has important implications for researchers’
willingness to collaborate and share knowledge. Public university managers may use
strategies to improve interdependence among research team members, favouring social
relations among researchers. Thus, public universities should enhance research teams
with stronger ties and high levels of trust that increase knowledge sharing.
Keywords
internal ties, knowledge management, knowledge sharing, public universities, research
teams, trust
Corresponding author:
Paola Garcı´a-Sa´nchez, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Campus de Tafira s/n, 35017, Las Palmas de
Gran Canaria, 35003, Spain.
Email: paola.garcia102@alu.ulpgc.es
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International Review of Administrative Sciences 85(1)
Introduction
In the past two decades, competition among universities has become globalized,
and higher education systems are under intense pressure to improve their services.
Universities have to respond to many types of pressure, such as decreasing gov-
ernmental financial assistance and new demands from social actors, among others
(Kim and Bak, 2016; Salaran, 2010). These challenges require universities to
expand their activities related to knowledge management. In this regard, a main
goal of public universities is the creation and transfer of knowledge through one of
their most important intangible assets: researchers (Ramı´rez et al., 2015).
Academics at public universities are encouraged to generate knowledge that is
relevant and useful to industry, but reputation, incentive schemes and professional
career progression are also closely linked to scientific excellence (Fullwood et al.,
2013). In this context, the development of new scientific knowledge has evolved as
it is no longer based on individual work, but rather based on collaboration and
cooperation among researchers (Gonzalez-Brambila, 2014; Stvilia et al., 2011).
These relationships allow academic researchers to learn from each other, and
they lead to new scientific findings. Consequently, creating a research team
becomes an important challenge because the generation of new knowledge is a
result not only of the work of individual researchers, but also of the relationships
established among them (Pezzoni et al., 2012; Wide´n-Wulff and Ginman, 2004).
The knowledge developed by a researcher comes from the scientific community
and returns there for discussion, validation and the broadening of the scientific field
(Bolisani and Scarso, 2014). Research teams provide a way to gather knowledge in
the academic context in order to come up with new ideas and solutions (Bakker
et al., 2006). However, academics who form part of research teams within the
structure of public universities do not seem to be enough for knowledge transfer.
Social relationships shared by researchers within these teams are necessary to pro-
mote the commitment, mutual understanding, identity, trust and cohesion that
favour knowledge management (Zboralski, 2009).
Within this context, the concept of social capital can be useful in explaining
knowledge sharing (Chung and Jackson, 2013). For academics, sharing individual
knowledge means that they are exposed to criticism and debate from other mem-
bers of the research team in order to incorporate new knowledge and shape the
initial idea (Wang et al., 2006). For this reason, ‘it is important to realize that
knowledge needs to be nurtured, supported, enhanced, and cared for’ (Wide´n-
Wulff and Ginman, 2004: 449). Therefore, it is necessary to expose individual
work to a social process, and these social processes must be managed to encourage
knowledge sharing. This situation makes universities more aware of the need to
establish the correct mechanisms to foster the exchange of flows of knowledge. It is
vital to understand the structure and content of the relationships among the mem-
bers of the research team.
Although cultivating effective work relationships has been studied extensively in
the literature of knowledge management (for a review, see Carpenter et al., 2012;
Phelps et al., 2012), some authors recognize that ‘employees are not always
Garcı´a-Sa´nchez et al.
193
competent or motivated to share their knowledge with others, have trouble under-
standing each other or differ in how they make sense of situations’ (Van Dijk et al.,
2016: 327). Thus, the purpose of this article is to extend the literature about the way
in which social capital contributes to knowledge sharing (Hu and Randel, 2014;
Wei-Li and Yi-Chih, 2016). Particularly, the objective of the study is to analyse
how the internal ties and trust among the members of research teams contribute to
knowledge sharing in the academic context, highlighting the importance of
encouraging strong ties among the members of a research team in order to promote
trust and share knowledge appropriately. Therefore, our article contributes to the
literature on social capital and knowledge sharing by revealing that structural and
relational dimensions of researchers’ social capital are interconnected, not isolated.
The value of the strong ties of researchers is completely realized if team members
trust one another and are thereby willing to share knowledge (Karahannan and
Preston, 2013). Although most previous studies have focused on the individual
level, our study considers that in the Spanish academic context, teams are the
basic unit of research in many scientific disciplines (Olmos-Pen˜uela et al., 2014).
The article is structured in five sections. After an introduction, the next section
develops the theoretical framework and formulates the hypotheses. The third sec-
tion describes the methodological aspects. The results of the empirical analysis are
explained in the fourth section, whereas the conclusions are presented in the fifth,
along with the implications and future lines of research.
Theory and hypotheses
Social capital can be defined ‘as the sum of the actual and potential resources
embedded within, available through, and derived from the network of relationships
possessed by an individual or social unit’ (Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998: 243). Thus,
it is the degree to which the contacts in a network have valuable resources that can
be reached through their relationships, as well as the network’s ability to transmit
and make the resources available to all members (Inkpen and Tsang, 2005;
Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998; Pil and Leana, 2009).
In the academic context, research team members are considered to be a com-
munity of researchers who work together in approaching and developing research
activities and sharing material and financial resources. They ‘have to invest
time and effort for generating, growing, and sustaining social relationships’
(Maurer et al., 2011: 160) in order to encourage the flow of knowledge among
team members with different types of specialized and diverse expertise (Grant,
1996). This bidirectional process where team members exchange organization-
related information, ideas, suggestions and expertise with each other is defined as
knowledge sharing. This process is a critical stage in knowledge transfer, which
involves knowledge donation and knowledge collection (Tangaraja et al., 2016).
Therefore, knowledge sharing requires team members to surrender their knowledge
and, at the same time, to be able to obtain knowledge from their colleagues for its
modification and reuse (Chen and Hung, 2010).
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International Review of Administrative Sciences 85(1)
Social capital is a multidimensional concept (Zheng, 2010) that includes the
description of the structure and content of social relations (Granovetter, 1973).
The structure comprises aspects related to the setting and properties of the net-
work, whereas the relational dimension encompasses aspects related to the content
and quality of the relationships developed among the members through their inter-
action. As Zheng (2010) points out, the former captures the physical setting of
relationships, whereas the latter comprises their substance, and one cannot be
understood without the other.
The ties created within a research team are closely linked to the time, intensity
and reciprocity in a relationship among researchers (Granovetter, 1973; Levin
et al.,...
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