The Impact of Social Capital on Employee Empowerment (Case study: Shariati Hospital Nurses)

Social capital is a concept based on the idea that social networks provide a basis for social cohesion and cooperation. It has been characterized as ‘the glue that holds societies togethe’. Social capital's most commonly adopted definition in health sciences recognizes five characteristics: community networks, civic engagement, civic identity (belonging, solidarity, equality), reciprocity and norms of cooperation, and trust in the community). Within the literature, studies distinguish between individual and collective conceptualizations of social capital, but the definition as a community asset is currently “privileged” over individual definitions. Social capital has been divided into two components, ‘structural social capital’ and ‘cognitive social capital’. Social capital refers to the institutions, relationships, and norms that shape the quality and quantity of a society's social interactions. Increasing evidence shows that social cohesion is critical for societies to prosper economically and for development to be sustainable. Social capital is not just the sum of the institutions which underpin a society – it is the glue that holds them together. Structural social capital refers to the existence of relationships, networks, and associations that link members together. Cognitive social capital is the ‘driving force’; it includes values, norms, civic responsibility, expected reciprocity, charity, altruism, and trust. Structural and cognitive social capital, respectively, can be characterized as what people ‘do’ and what people ‘feel’ in terms of social relations.
Employee empowerment is an important organizational issue. Empowered employees with new ideas and innovative attributes may increase their ability to respond more effectively to face extensive changes in current public health care work environments. Management literature defines empowerment as a set of
managerial techniques, with no attention to its nature or the processes nderlying the construct (Spreitzer, 1995). Employees may lack psychological xperiences with empowerment, and emphasizing the process of sharing authority may result in an inadequate understanding of the notion of empowerment and its theoretical rationale for related practice. Researchers have extended these definitions to include job redesign, self efficacy by reducing powerlessness , and intrinsic task motivation . Combining organizational and psychological domains, employee empowerment may be viewed as a cognitive state, a psychologically empowered experience with power-sharing, competence and value internalization in organizations. Employee empowerment can be conceptualized as the symbolic construction of the personal state of employees characterized by competence, or the skill and ability to perform effectively, and control, or the authority and autonomy to act . Feelings of competence and feelings of control jointly determine whether the employees feel adequately empowered. Extant public relations studies on empowerment focus mainly on the aspect of power sharing, specifically, how to get the public relations professionals seated at the corporate decision-making table and empowerment of minorities in public relations.
Material and The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of social capital on the employees’ empowerment. The statistical population of this study includes nurses of Shariati Hospital in the City of Tehran. The sample members were selected through random sampling method. In order to collect the research data, two questionnaires were developed based on the social capital questionnaire of Ston (2001) and questionnaire of employees’ empowerment of Spiretiris (1996). The face validity of the questionnaire has already been investigated and confirmed. On the other hand, the reliability of the questionnaire has been examined through Cronbachs’ Alpha Coefficient.
Discussion of The Coefficients of social capital and employees’ empowerment questionnaires were 0.85 and 0.78 relatively. In order to test the hypotheses, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) method was used in the Amos 18. The findings revealed that social capital influences employees’ empowerment significantly (path coefficient: 0.76, CR: 3.69). The results of secondary hypotheses of research indicated that social capital influences competency (path coefficient: 0.69), meaningfulness (path coefficient: 0.84), being effectiveness (path coefficient: 0.72), and authority of choice (path coefficient: 0.75) significantly. The results of analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed that there is not any significant difference between respondents with different demographic characteristics in terms of the effects of social capital on employee empowerment.