Methodology of organizational social capital research: approaches of scientific studies

Purpose. The purpose of this article is to analyze key methodological research approaches to studying organizational social capital. The following principles of psychology have been analyzed: reflection, development, determinism, consistency, comprehensiveness, and holism. The special attention has focused on specific approaches of social psychology such as social nature of psyche and consciousness, development of consciousness in the process of activity and communication, changes of psychological processes under human beings' interactions, comprehensive analysis of individual, group and public factors, the building of models for social-psychological phenomena and processes. Findings. The key findings of methodological research are that the logical system has been created that includes both methodological approaches of general and social psychology and explains the application of consistency and comprehensiveness principals for studying organizational social capital. The feature of contemporary research is to use a comprehensiveness approach studying an individual's psyche. Therefore, examining human beings, there is a special tendency that combines different sciences, aspects and research methods in complex systems. According to the consistency approach, research objects are myriads of psychological processes, states, attributes, activity actions that must be classified, systematized and ordered. The main function of consistency research is to integrate information about the object. Analyzing the concept of social capital, we have followed the comprehensiveness and consistency approaches. Hence, the methodological research approach regarding comprehensiveness is that social capital is placed at the intersection of four disciplines, namely, social psychology, organizational psychology, economic psychology, and sociology. Based on the consistency approach, various social structural characteristics of social capital should be considered which are connected to particular external social environment, components and functions of social capital as well as types and nascent stages under external and internal conditions of consolidation and accumulation. Conclusions are that the organizational social capital is reasonable to study under consistency and comprehensiveness approaches. Orginality. Originality of this paper is that the scientific development of key methodological research approaches has been introduced to study organizational social capital.