The effect of social capital on knowledge creation in Petrochemical Industry

Article history: Received October 12, 2012 Received in revised format 26 January 2013 Accepted 27 January 2013 Available online January 3


Introduction
With the revolution in information technology and the rapid development of information and network technology, there has been a major change in the pattern of global economic growth since nineteenth and knowledge has become the most important assets as a replacement of financial and physical capital (Hansen, 1999;Chen et al., 2004).Knowledge-based business environment requires new organizational approach to include intangible assets such as knowledge and competence of human resources, innovation, customer relations, organizational culture, systems, organizational structure, etc.In such circumstances, social capital has become an interesting area of investigation (Bontis, 1995;Bontis, 1999).Social capital is one of the most important components of social capital, which could help organizations create success (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998).Some researchers have examined the impact of social capital on the transmission of other sources but, to the best of our knowledge, there is no research on relationship between social capital and knowledge creation.The organization is a social group, characterized by efficiency and speed in the transfer of knowledge (Kogut & Zander, 1996) and it is new concept of organization theory (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995;Zander & Kogut, 1995).In addition, organizations must have inside organizational relationships to overcome to any unwanted uncertainties (Carey & Lawson, 2011).Social capital is one the most important components of any organization, which could help deliver the necessary knowledge (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998;Wood et al., 2012).
The primary component of social capital is associated with different patterns of connection among employees (Burt, 1995).There are different types of relationships among members of an organization.For instance, Burt (1995) discusses that a limited number of people could build better connections with others and Hansen (1999) stated that a weak relationship is a major barrier for transferring knowledge.In fact, a suitable organization could build better connections with other firms.A good relationship is the primary source of learning and communicating with others (Chen & Wu, 2010).There are normally two kinds of relationships of one way and two ways communications.In one-way relationship, the flow of information is distributed from one side while in two-way communication, people could get in touch with each other and there is a better method for communication (Prahinski & Benton, 2004).
According to Mohr and Nevin (1990), in two-way communication, there is a better mutual trust and respect between people.The quality of information is another component of social relationship and helps people make good decisions (Oliver & Anderson, 1995).According to Haghighat (2008), an organization with good technology equipment could improve itself for empowering employees.According to Lévy Mangin et al. (2008), information technology could facilitate information inside organizations.Relationship is another component of social capital, which includes different components including trust, normality, rules and regulations as well as expectations and identity (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998).Trust is the most influential component for building social capital (Boisot, 1995) followed by normality, which is an essential part of building trust (Starbuck, 1992).Expectation is another important component of building a stable social capital (Coleman, 1994).People in a social network must have unique identity and close believes (Cicourel, 1973).

The proposed method
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of social capital on knowledge creation in petrochemical industry.The proposed study of this paper considers whether social capital has any impact on knowledge creation and how it influences on creating knowledge.The study investigates the impact of social capital in terms of three components of cognitive, relational and structural capitals on knowledge creation.The proposed study has been performed among 270 petro chemical experts who had sufficient experiences in this industry and the sample size is calculated as follows, where N is the population size, and N=290, the number of sample size is calculated as n=170.We have distributed 170 questionnires and collected 118 filled ones.The proposed study designed the questionnaire in Likert scale and used 12 experts feedback to validate the questionnaire.Cronbach alphas were calculated for structural capital, relational capital and human capital as 0.768, 0.798 and 0.842, respectively.In addition, Cronbach alpha was calculated for knowledge creation as 0.810 and overal Cronbach was calculated as 0.79, which is well above the minimum acceptable limit.We use structural equation modeling to study the impacts of different variables based on factor analysis.

The results
We first present details of important factors using first round of factor analysis on different decision variables.

Table 1
The results of factor analysis In addition, relational capital is the second most important factor in our analysis where six components of this survey decribe 79.9% of total variance of changes.This factor includes Mutual trust relationships (30.7),Cooperation as a rule (18.9), existance of team work (23.2), accepting criticisim (18.6), Commitment to organization's interest (18.2),Being a member of family organization (19.6).
The third factor, congnitive capital is the third important variable in our survey and it describes 71.64% of total variance of changes.In this category, existence of common objectives (43.7), and cooperation based on common interest (24.8) are important factors of our survey.
In summary, knowledge creation incorporates four components and represents 79.06% of total variance of changes.This item also includes four componets including Creating new opportunities by technology (12.3),Creating new technologies (26.8),Differenation between various technologies (26.2),Learning from technology (24.1).
Table 2 summarizes details of testing various variables using t-student test.In summary, the impacts of all three factors have been confirmed with structural capital with the coefficient of 0.76, relational capital with 0.45 and cognitive with 0.39.

Conclusion
Knowledge has been a precious asset in the new millennium and it is getting more important to learn the effects of different parameters influencing creation of knowledge.In this paper, we have presented an empirical study to investigate the effects of various parameters on knowledge creation in petrochemical industry.The results of our survey have shown that human capital components including structural, relational and cognitive significantly impact knowledge creation.Table 3 shows the summary of testing three hypotheses of this survey,

Table 3
The results of testing three hypotheses of the proposed study

FigFig. 1 .
Fig. 1.The framework of the proposed model