SOCIAL CAPITAL AND DYNAMIC CAPABILITIES IN A TOP MANAGEMENT TEAM

Top management teams greatly influence the performance of their organizations based on their interpretations of the situations they face and the decisions they make built on those interpretations. In addition, the long-term success of the organization relies upon the top management team’s ability to properly balance the exploration and exploitation capabilities of the organization. The literature regarding the impact of the top management team’s social capital is limited and even less is known about the intra-organizational social capital of this group. This study examines the effect of the top management team’s intra-organizational social capital on exploratory and exploitative dynamic capability creation as well as the potential mediating role of the relational dimension of social capital. In so doing, this study follows prior research which found that different dimensions of social capital were needed for the successful completion of different types of tasks and applied the same thinking toward the top management team’s social capital and dynamic capabilities.