THE ROLE OF SOCIAL CAPITAL
3. Method
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Additional lines of evidence provide support for our prediction that socially skilled entrepreneurs will develop their network of relations and then their social capital more effectively so that they both raise their status within the market, and provide essential resources for the development of their new ventures.
In this perspective, Baron and Markman (2000, p.1) reported that « Specific social skills, such as the ability to read others accurately, to make favorable first impressions, adapt to a wide range of social situations, and be persuasive, can influence the quality of these interactions»; they added that « social capital is often the result of such skills».
In line with these assumptions, Diener and Seligman (2002) mentioned that «persons with high various social skills tend to have social contacts wider than those with low social skills».
Similarly, Baron (2004, p.222) revealed that «social skills may provide an important foundation for the development of social capital».
Hypothesis 5: The entrepreneur’s social skills are positively related to the development of his social capital.
Furthermore, Meurs (2008) used Conservation of Resources theory to support that social capital resources are gathered, maintained, and employed to reach desired personal and organizational goals by the socially skilled individual.
The resources he proposed are the most valuable, rare, inimitable, and non substitutable (Barney, 1986, 1991). He argued that a socially skilled person is better able to discern the resources that fall into those categories and to strategically employ them in the pursuit of his desired goals.
In this regard, we suggest testing these hypotheses:
Hypothesis 5a: The entrepreneur’s skill at persuasiveness is positively related to the development of his social capital.
Hypothesis 5b: The higher the entrepreneur’s skill at ingratiation, the higher his social capital’s level will be.
Hypothesis 5c: The entrepreneur’s proficiency at personal emotional intelligence has a positive impact on the level of his social capital.
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data if a single latent factor accounts for all the observable variables. We adopted Harman’s one-factor test to investigate the common method variance (for more details, see Podsakoff and al, 2003). All the items that we have used to measure the independent and dependant variables were entered into an exploratory factor analysis. The results revealed the presence of eight factors with eigenvalues greater than one (respectively to Kaiser criterion) and the first factor explained only 14.392 of the total variance. Thus, there is no significant common method bias in our data.
3.3. Measures
Whenever it was possible for us, we adopted measures from the literature. However, an arrangement of certain items and exclusion of others was necessary to increase the scale’s assessment and enhance the credibility and usefulness of interviewees’ feedback data. The new final instrument resulting from this work contains the concise and understandable items which reflect more accurately the content of their relative constructs.
For each construct, the correspondent items were subject to Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with varimax rotation which creates orthogonal-not correlated factors. For this reason, we first examined the interitem correlation matrix within each construct and dropped those that show low correlations. As a rule of Thumb, we kept only the items which contribute to a KMO’s value greater than 0.7 and an eigenvalue greater that one by each factor (relatively to Kaiser-Mayer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy, Bartlett’s test of sphericity and Kaiser criterion).
For some factors, we accepted a KMO’s value close to 0.65.
In addition, we checked the reliability, stability and unidimensionnality of each construct. Cronbach’s Alpha for each construct was greater than 0.70, the cutoff value suggested by Nunally (1978).
Social skills
As mentioned above, we referred to the empirical scope of the social skill conceptualization considered by Markman and Baron (1998), Baron and Markman (2003) and Baron and Tang (2009). A 1-5 point Likert-type reflective scale ranging from one representing “strongly disagree” to five representing “strongly agree” was used to measure the specific social skills that we have chosen in the present research. Each rating is a single item on a 5-point scale.
Higher scores reflect higher levels of social skills. The measurements employed are described and presented in details in Table 1, as follows.
TABLE 1: RESULTS OF FACTOR ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL SKILLS’ MEASURES
Items Factor1 Factor2 Factor3 Factor4 Factor5
Persuasiveness
1- I am very good at getting other people to do what I
want in most situations -0.015 0.133 -0.113 0.862 0.146
2- If I set out to persuade someone to change his views on
an issue, I am usually quite successful in doing so 0.054 0.094 0.078 0.877 0.182 3- I don’t find any difficulty to speak in front of a large
group of people 0.005 0.023 -0.095 0.856 0.175
Personal Emotional Intelligence
4- I understand and recognize my own emotions, and their
effects, my strengths and my limits 0.035 0.949 0.036 0.028 -0.018
5- I always control my disruptive emotions as well as my
impulses 0.000 0.973 0.048 0.031 -0.026
6-I usually actualize my potentialities and I do my best to
meet a standard of excellence 0.019 0.959 0.008 0.049 0.047
7- I am capable for adapting my feelings and to
appropriate them in any situation 0.060 0.804 -0.004 0.156 0.015
Social Emotional Intelligence
8- I can sense others’ feelings and perspectives, and taking
an active interest in their concerns 0.979 0.011 -0.061 0.031 -0.016
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9- I can easily guide individuals, groups and generate
enthusiasm in a team of work 0.932 0.007 -0.038 0.037 0.019
10- I can usually create a group synergy in order to
pursue collective goals, when I work with many persons 0.932 0.096 -0.063 -0.016 0.031 11- I am capable of building long-lasting, mutual and
satisfying relationships with others 0.927 0.007 -0.033 -0.001 0.001
Self-promotion
12- I can easily talk proudly about my education and
experience 0.107 0.029 0.740 -0.066 -0.107
13- I make others aware of my qualifications and abilities -0.114 -0.087 0.783 -0.118 -0.167 14- I make other people aware of my accomplishments -0.009 0.076 0.762 0.013 -0.059 15- I let others know that a I have a lot of competencies in
my domain -0.192 0.044 0.767 0.031 0.120
Ingratiation
16- I do personal favors for others to show them that I
am friendly 0.027 0.007 0.015 0.171 0.770
17- I use flattery and favors so that others like me more 0.030 0.005 -0.127 0.187 0.861 18- I have no trouble praising others for their
accomplishments so that they consider me a nice person -0.028 -0.081 -0.104 0.118 0.845
Eigenvalues 3.968 3.449 3.192 2.101 1.355
Percentage of variance explained 20.143 19.291 13.324 13.177 12.204
Cumulative Percentage of variance explained 20.143 39.434 52.758 70.609 78.139 Persuasiveness
A five-item evaluation of the participants’ persuasiveness was taken from the instrument used by Markman and Baron (1998). However, in our context, only 3 of 5 items are gathered in a single latent factor. Persuasiveness explains 78.667% of the total variance (KMO= 0.734). Items 4 and 5 were less correlated to other items. Therefore, they were dropped.
Impression management
The eight-item scale developed by Baron and Tang (2009) was employed to measure Management impression. In their work, Baron and Tang referred to the instrument of Bolino and Turnley (1999) and obtained two distinct constructs: ingratiation (four items) and self- promotion (four items). Once a factor analysis is conducted for the eight items, one item is dropped because it is less correlated with the second factor (ingratiation). Then, seven items are fitted in with their two convenient constructs, with eigenvalues greater than one and explaining 65.256% of the total variance (KMO=6.73).
As noted above (in the theoretical development), of the two dimensions of impression management, self promotion seems to be inappropriate for the present study and especially for the Tunisian context as it induces negative reactions on the majority of the interviewees. Therefore, we retained only ingratiation.
Emotional intelligence
Several suggestions of measures are highly recommended by researchers who made great efforts in working on Emotional Intelligence. We referred to those proposed by Markman and Goleman (1998); Goleman et al (2002); Bar-On (2005) and obtained a concise nine-item scale appropriate to our research, by taking into consideration the data collected for the qualitative approach. The items related to influence are dropped to avoid any multi-colinearity between persuasiveness and social emotional intelligence. Once a factor analysis is performed on the nine obtained items, one item is eliminated (Item 6) leading to two distinct factors with an acceptable level of KMO (KMO= 0.806). These two factors correspond respectively to the personal emotional intelligence (4 items) and the social emotional intelligence (4 items), with eigenvalues greater than 1. Together, they explain 87.782 % of the total variance.
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Once again, of the two distinct aspects of emotional intelligence, social emotional intelligence items seem to be less coherent with the objectives of our study. Hence, we have chosen to limit our emphasis to personal emotional intelligence which was more evoked by experts in our qualitative research.
Social capital
As noted above, we refer to the bridging social capital view which incorporates weak and non redundant ties in an extended network of relations. Following the previous researches (Burt, 1992, 1997, 2000; Seibert et al, 2001), we presented the social capital as a multidimensional construct including the structural non redundancy, the number of weak ties and the size of the entrepreneurs’ network. We kept these measures as metric ones. The size of the entrepreneurs’
network corresponds to the number of people who helped these entrepreneurs, in some way, with the development of his project during the last six months (the maximal size of the network was ten). Weak ties are occasional or professional and correspond to distant relationships between the entrepreneur and his peers (friends, customers, colleagues). These weak ties are also supposed to assist the entrepreneur in the development of his new venture.
Structural Diversity (SD) measurement arises from Borgatti and colleagues’ (2002) software (UCINET VI) which calculates the structural constraint (SC) of each entrepreneur’s network. SD is derived from SC as follows: SD = 1- SC.
A metric three-item scale is then developed to assess the entrepreneurial social capital.
The network size, the number of weak ties and the SD gathered in one factor: the entrepreneurial social capital. This factor eigenvalue is greater than 1 and explain 77.779% of the total variance (KMO= 0.687).
Access to financial resources
On the basis of Batjargal and Liu’s (2004) research, we measured access to financing with three items: (a) The number of articles, which protect the investor’s interests and his property rights in the convention that we have signed, is limited; (b) The period separating the date of the investment decision and the effective injection of the financing is short; (c) The difference between the initial amount of investment and the financing that we have really obtained is negligible. We slightly modified the original scale by converting it to a 1-5 point Likert-type reflective scale to make some arrangement and homogeneity between the two dependant variables. These items explain 73.830 % of the total variance (KMO= 0.705).
Access to useful informational resources
We operationalized access to the relevant information with reference to Lee and al’s (2002) as well as to Baron and Tang’s (2009) scales and obtained this four-item scale, taking into account feedbacks arising from our qualitative research: (a) we can easily search and locate the relevant technical and commercial information required for the development of the venture; (b) It’s quite easy for us to gain access to the relevant technical and commercial information; (c) we can easily get the technical and commercial information that we need for the project; (d) we can quickly gain access to the useful technical and commercial information needed for the development of the venture.
These items are positively correlated with each other and lead to a single latent factor explaining 78.294% of the total variance (KMO= 0.835).
All the items were maintained for the two dependant variables.