The Social Capital of French and American Managers

Abstract

Accumulating empirical evidence on American managers shows that social-capital effects on performance are a function of the information and control benefits of bridging structural holes—the disconnections between nonredundant contacts in a network. Is that network form of social capital unique to Americans? France seemed to us a productive site for comparative research because the image from past research is that French managers are more regulated than Americans; more regulated by bureaucratic authority and more regulated by peer pressure, with both amplified by the greater reliance in France on internal labor markets. People comfortable with knowing their place in a chain of bureaucratic control could be uncomfortable with the negotiated control exercised by network entrepreneurs, so the positive association between structural holes and performance in the United States could be negligible or even reversed for French managers. We use network and performance data on two study populations of senior managers, one in France and one in the United States, to describe social capital similarities and differences between the populations. The network form of social capital is similar in the two populations: More successful French managers, like Americans, tend to have networks rich in structural holes. The French and American managers make similar distinctions between kinds of relationships. Relations that bridge structural holes are similarly detached from routine work activities for the French and the Americans. The interesting difference is that social capital develops differently in the two populations. The French managers operate with a less porous social boundary around their firm and associate negative emotions with bridge relations. Reinforcing Aix-en-Provence observations on the significance of adult education for Franco-German differences in organization, we find that exposure to peers in other firms via executive education is for our French managers the only factor positively associated with the social capital of bridge relationships.