Trust in the Context of Management Relationships: An Empirical Study‪.‬

Introduction Organizational social capital has recently appeared as a topic of research and theoretical interest in the organizational and economics literature (e.g., Tsai and Ghoshal, 1998; Nahapiet and Ghoshal, 1998; Leana and Van Buren III, 1999; Fernandez et al, 2000; Tsai, 2000; Laurence and Prusak, 2001; Adler and Kwon, 2002; Anand et al, 2002). This stream of interest led one theorist to comment that "the concept of social capital has become one of the most popular exports from sociological theory into everyday language" (Portes, 1998). But while the generic principle of social capital theory is well established, its application is much less advanced. As Fernandez et al (2000) note, if the term 'social capital' is to mean anything more than 'networks have value', there should be evidence of what that value is. Indeed, while the evidence for linkages between networks and firm performance has been the subject of many theoretical and empirical studies (e.g., Zaheer and Bell, 2002; Stuart, 2000; Fischer and Pollock, 2002), the dynamics of network content have been left relatively unattended. In this sense, if the concept is to advance beyond its current state, the constituent parts, antecedents, and outcomes of social capital, including trust, need to be more clearly identifiable (Zaheer and Bell, 2002).