An exploration study on the relationship between social capital and public librarians ’ personal characteristics

Article history: Received January 20, 2014 Accepted 30 August 2014 Available online August 31 2014 Social capital plays essential role for development of strong long-term employee commitment. This paper presents a study to investigate the effects of some employees’ personal characteristics on all components of social capital. The study uses a standard questionnaire developed by Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998) [Nahapiet, J., & Ghoshal, S. (1998). Social capital, intellectual capital, and the organizational advantage. Academy of Management Review, 23(2), 242-266.]. The study has accomplished among all employees who worked as librarian in Astane Quds Razavi main library in city of Mashhad, Iran in 2014. The study has concluded that although age, job experience, marital status and type of employment had no impact on social capital, gender played essential role on this survey. In other words, our survey has indicated that women presented more social capital than men did. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Social capital Librarian Personal characteristics


Introduction
Social capital plays essential role for development of strong long-term employee commitment (Baker, 2000).Njagi (2012) explained the nature of employee promotion in a firm.He tried to find out on how social capital could influence on employee's promotion.The study indicated that employees are social beings but their social relationships could differ from one employee to another.The study also stated that networking was an important factor of human beings.In their survey, Njagi concluded that there was a high relationship between social capital and employee promotion.Zacharakis and Flora (2005) tried to understand the dynamics between different components of social capital.They also tried to find out whether there was an appropriate balance between social capital and cultural reproduction or not.They concluded that community development projects frequently tend to reproduce existing leadership structures.Svendsen (2013) performed a survey and concluded that there was an extensive collaboration between the branch libraries and other public institutions in a study accomplished in Denmark.
According to Vårheim (2011), public libraries are promising arenas for building social trust, and follow-up investigation looking at the behaviors of many people who participate in different programs for increasing our knowledge on the mechanisms building trust and social capital-that is, for theory development and for library practice.

The proposed study
This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the relationship between social capital and personal characteristics of the library employees who work at Imam Reza International University in city of Mashhad, Iran.The study uses a questionnaire developed by Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998) for measuring different components of social capital.The main hypothesis of the survey is associated with an assessment of social capital in this organization.There are five sub-hypotheses in this survey as follows, 1.There is a difference between female and male's social capital.
2. There is a difference between single and marrieds' social capital.
3. There is a difference between employee status and social capital.
4. There is a difference between years of job experiences and social capital.
5. There is a difference between employee's age and social capital.
In our study, we have selected 30 out of 126 employees and distributed the questionnaire to validate the overall questionnaire.Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.917, which is well above the acceptable level.In our survey, there were 126 employees and the proposed study designed a questionnaire, distributed it among all employees and managed to collected 120 properly filled ones.Table 1 demonstrates some basic statistics associated with the social capital components.

The results
In this section, we present details of our findings on testing various hypotheses of the survey.

The first hypothesis: The relationship between gender and social capital
The first hypothesis of the survey investigates the relationship between gender and social capital.
Table 5 shows mean and standard deviation of participants' gender in terms of various categories of social capital.According to the results of Table 5, most components maintain an average of well above 3.In addition, female maintain bigger numbers than men and finally, the mean of structural capital is greater than other two components of social capital.Table 6 shows details of the results of Levin and t-student tests for the first hypothesis of the survey.According to the results of Table 6, since t-student value is statically significant, we may, therefore, reject the null hypothesis and conclude that there is a meaningful difference between social capital in terms of gender.

The second hypothesis: The relationship between marital status and social capital
The second hypothesis of the survey studies the relationship between marital status and social capital.Table 6 demonstrates mean and standard deviation of participants' marital status in terms of different categories of social capital.Again, according to the results of Table 7, most components maintain an average of well above 3.In addition, married employees maintain bigger numbers than singles and finally, the mean of structural capital is greater than other two components of social capital.Table 8 presents details of the results of Levin and t-student tests for the second hypothesis of the survey.According to the results of Table 8, since t-student value is not statically significant, therefore, we cannot reject the null hypothesis and conclude that there is not any meaningful difference between social capital in terms of marital status.

The third hypothesis: The relationship between employment status and social capital
The third hypothesis of the survey studies the relationship between employment status and social capital.Table 9 demonstrates mean and standard deviation of participants' employment status in terms of various categories of social capital.

Table 9
The summary of mean and standard deviation of social capital and employment status One more time, based on the results of Table 9, most components have an average of well above 3.In addition, structural capital maintains higher mean than the other two components of social capital.Table 10 presents details of the results of ANOVA test for the third hypothesis of the survey.

Table 10
The summary of ANOVA for testing the effect of employment type According to the results of Table 10, since F-value is not statically significant, therefore, we cannot reject the null hypothesis and conclude that there was not any meaningful difference between social capital for various types of employment.

The fourth hypothesis: The relationship between job experience and social capital
The fourth hypothesis of the survey studies the relationship between employments' job experiences and social capital.Table 11 shows mean and standard deviation of participants' job experiences in terms of various categories of social capital.

Table 11
The summary of mean and standard deviation of social capital and job experience Again, based on the results of Table 11, most components have an average of well above 3.In addition, structural capital maintains higher mean than the other two components of social capital.
Table 12 shows details of the results of ANOVA test for the fourth hypothesis of the survey.

Table 12
The summary of Chi-Square for testing the effect of job experience According to the results of Table 12, since F-value is not statically significant, therefore, we cannot reject the null hypothesis and conclude that there was not any meaningful difference between social capital for people with various job experiences.

The fifth hypothesis: The relationship between age and social capital
The fifth hypothesis of the survey studies the relationship between employments' age and social capital.Table 13 demonstrates mean and standard deviation of participants' age in terms of various categories of social capital.Table 14 shows details of the results of ANOVA test for the last hypothesis of the survey.According to the results of Table 14, since F-value is not statically significant, therefore, we cannot reject the null hypothesis and conclude that there was not any meaningful difference between social capital for people with various age.

Conclusion
In this paper, we have presented an empirical investigation to study the effects of some librarians' personal characteristics on social capital.The study has applied a standard questionnaire in Likert scale, distributed among all population of the survey and using some statistical tests, it has concluded that although age, job experience, marital status and type of employment had no impact on social capital, gender played essential role on this survey.In other words, our survey has indicated that women presented more social capital than men did.
As we can observe from the results of Table1, identity maintains the highest value and common normality receives the minimum score.In addition, Table2demonstrates the summary of different structural components of social capital.As observed in, group relationships maintains the highest value and good organization receives the minimum score.

Table 2
Mean and standard deviation of structural components of social capital

Table 5
The summary of mean and standard deviation of gender in terms of social capital and gender

Table 6
The summary of t-student and Levin tests

Table 13
The summary of mean and standard deviation of social capital and participants' age

Table 14
The summary of ANOVA for testing the effect of participants' age F-value = 0.892 Sig.= 0.471