Can Information Technologies Affect Social Capital?

The ability of employees to interact and work together as a team is essential for the functioning and survival of organizations. Social capital, as a social network, has the propensity to enhance the quality of interactive relation- ships within organizations but physical interaction was defined as a crucial re- quirement for the development of generalized trust and other pro-social attitudes and behaviours. The introduction of IT (Information Technologies) change the way of information flow using innovative means of communication. The purpose of this paper is to examine the possible influence of IT on social capital. Through a qualitative approach, we collected data from a survey involving 63 employees, users of LinkedIn, working at banking and telecommunications companies in It- aly. The findings show that IT can either support or hurt existing social capital within organizations and the variety of its influence depends on social network perspectives such as bonding, bridging, and linking social capital. IT develop and improve bonding social capital because the common backgrounds in IT capabil- ities perform to handle accordingly and for the right reasons the new information systems and means of communication. In contrast, IT hinder bridging and linking social capital because of weak trust, egocentric attitudes, perceived indifference to teamwork and fear of mistakes to interact online with a high-level member of the team. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this research and provide suggestions for future research