SCCD: Social Capital-Driven Career Development Framework

Sociological theories of career success provide fundamental principles for the analysis of social networks to identify patterns that facilitate career development. Structural Hole Theory argues that certain network structures provide advantages to individuals by facilitating them to access unique information from parts of the network. The network structural advantages of social networks in workplace settings have not been studied enough for the purpose of employees career development. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing a Social Capital-Driven Career Development framework which leverages enterprise collaboration activity streams to assess employees social capital across organizational hierarchy levels. We demonstrate that our framework can enable employees to reflect on their social network structure from the prospective of information benefits for progressing their career from one hierarchy level to the immediate next level in their respective business units.