Teaching executives to see social capital: Results from a field experiment

This paper is about the benefits of teaching executives to understand the network structure of social capital. There is abundant cross-sectional evidence of performance correlated with network structure. Corroborating that evidence, we run a field experiment in which executives educated in the network structure of social capital show performance improvement relative to a control group of untrained, but otherwise equally able peers: program graduates are 36-42% more likely to receive top performance evaluations, 43-72% more likely to be promoted (an effect that builds in the 2 years following the program), and 42-74% more likely to be retained by the company. Active participation matters. The subsequent careers of executives who were quiet spectators in the program cannot be distinguished from the careers of people in the control group, peers who never attended the program.