Exploration of Social Capital and Knowledge Sharing: An Empirical Study on Student Virtual Teams

Although research on virtual teams is becoming more popular, there is a gap in the understanding of how social capital affects knowledge sharing and creating, and their impacts on virtual team performance. To fill in this gap, this study establishes a framework by incorporating social capital with the SECI model and further examines it with an experiment on 65 student virtual teams. The results show that three factors of social capital, namely network ties, shared vision and trust are positively related to the four SECI modes, namely socialization, internalization, combination and externalization, and the latter three factors are found to be positively related to virtual team performance. The contributions of this study are twofold. The framework examines the relationships between social capital and the SECI model, which brought a broader prospective of studying knowledge management in a virtual team context. Moreover, leaders and managers of virtual teams should be made aware of enhancing the effects of social capital to improve the processes of knowledge sharing and creating, and encouraging internalizationn, combination and externalization to substitute the role of socialization.