To Bond or to Bridge? Contingent Effects of Managers’ Social Capital on Organizational Performance

A top manager’s social capital is considered a critical resource for determining organizational outcomes. However, little is known about the impact of social capital on public organizations’ performance. By dimensionalizing social capital into two subdimensions, this study investigates the impact of a superintendent’s bonding and bridging social capital on the performance of school districts. This study’s findings show that bridging social capital has positive impacts on organizational performance, but in a time of financial difficulty it worsens the negative shocks of the difficulty. Bonding social capital is found to be exactly the opposite. This study argues that choosing between bonding and bridging social capital is not an “either-or” question, and top managers are required to balance the two, depending on the situations that their organizations face.