Is social capital an influencer to career success of global managers?

Abstract

The importance of understanding successful career of global manager increases significantly due to dramatic globalization in business. Global managers having successful career has significant implications for both individuals and organizations.In the age where success is more social and relational than it has been, how a global manager’s network capital influences his/her career, within and across companies, triggers my curiosity and motivated this research. Based on social capital theory, this research aims to explain to which extent social capital affect career success; is this relationship moderated by gender; and if this relationship is different between internal and external promotions. Instead of in-dept interview like most of previous research on global career success I applied a large-scale quantitative analysis to gain a wider look into the relation of network capital held by global manager and his/her successful career progression. This broad look enables pattern discovery. Secondary data was collected from Wharton Research and BoardEx databases.

Findings and discussion of this study shed light on the impact of social capital on career success of global managers. The popularity of an employee in a company slightly shortens the time to get next promotion in that specific company. The quantity of a direct connections has less influence on career success than the quality of the connections. Knowing key people, particularly company’s board members, speed up the intra-organizational promotion pace more effectively, especially for women. For cross-company upward mobility, the higher rate of board members in network, the faster a global manager can take higher position in new company. Although male and female global managers perform indifferently in networking formation, female gains more advantage on career outcomes when having better quality of network. Practical implications emphasize not only on the need of networking but also on better way to networking. Specifically, networking diversely between genders as well as across firm’s border is crucial to achieve career success to both men and women.