Mobilized social capital and career success: A model of retrieval, referral, and reinforcement

Abstract

Social capital has been widely used to explain employees' objective and subjective career success. However, having social capital is one thing, and being able to use it is another thing. In the seminal social resources theory, the social mobilization process is theorized as a key intermediary process to transform social capital into valued job or career outcomes (Lin, 1999, 2001). Despite its importance, social capital mobilization has received limited scholarly attention, possibly due to the empirical challenges of measuring it as real-time events or individual behaviors over an extended career trajectory. We innovatively bypass this long-standing methodological challenge by focusing on the social capital that has already been mobilized at some point in time. We argue that social capital is mobilized from time to time and accumulates into mobilized social capital stored within an individual's social network. Through a qualitative study, we inductively identified three forms of mobilized social capital in the networks of retrieval, referral, and reinforcement (3Rs), which respectively capture the retrieval of career-related information, opportunities arising from social connections, and productivity spillover from social contacts. In a subsequent quantitative study, we employed a whole-network approach in a small high-tech start-up to operationalize these 3Rs and found that retrieval and reinforcement were positively associated with two career success outcomes (i.e., salary and career satisfaction), while referral was positively associated with supervisor-rated promotability.