The Dark Side of Social Capital: Investigating the Role of Social Capital in the Tendency to Administrative Corruption

Most research on social capital has stressed its positive aspects and advantages, while informal relations and trust-based networks shaped based on social capital can enhance individual’s access to information, improve their trust and confidence, and increase the possibility of corruption. Taking this into account, the present paper aimed at studying the role of social capital in the tendency to administrative corruption through a descriptive-correlational research method. The statistical population was consisted of all governmental organizations’ employees, out of which 391 individuals were selected using convenience sampling technique. The questionnaire by Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998) was used to investigate the social capital conditions, and the questionnaire by Gorsira et al (2016) was applied to study corruption motivators and tendency to corruption. Findings indicated that the existence of social capital among employees in the public sector intensifies the corruption motivators’ impact on the tendency to corruption, and if such individuals and groups have high levels of social capital, the possibility that corruption motivators could lead to administrative corruption is significantly increased.