An Empirical Analysis on Social Capital and Enterprise 2.0 Participation in a Research Institute

Social capital broadly refers to the opportunities an individual has by being part of a network of relationships. Recently organizations started deploying internal Enterprise 2.0 platforms and Social Network Sites (SNS) to improve how employees collaborate and work. In this paper we report our analysis of the relationships between social capital and the use of a SNS in a research institute. Data collected through a survey from 54% of its 670 employees have been investigated with factor and regression analysis. We found users enabled to use the system, currently one third of all employees, have significantly higher social capital. Moreover social capital correlates with self-reported intensity of SNS usage, while we did not find statistically significant correlation with real usage extracted from system logs but for the unexpected fact that heavy users exhibit a smaller knowledge of their colleagues. We also find significant relationships between social capital and different demographic features such as seniority, job role, age, gender. There are few studies analyzing the real impact of SNSs on employees ability to collaborate. We believe further work is needed in this area so we released the SNS we developed as open source software, aiming at promoting its adoption by other organizations. We also released the dataset we collected in this analysis for comparative purposes.