Ray Research Focuses on Human, Social Capital

Caitlin Ray, assistant professor of Human Resource Studies, has had papers published on a pair of related topics – human capital resources and social capital resources.

In “Human Capital Resources: Reviewing the First Decade and Establishing a Foundation for Future Research,” published in January in the Journal of Management, Ray and her co-authors review previous research that has looked at how human capital – individual employees – work together in a group to help a company be successful.

According to Ray, there has been a push over the past decade to understand how people come together in groups. Her review highlights the importance of thinking about how the group comes together to function best, rather than focusing just on the individual contributor.

“A challenge that organizations face is understanding when and why some groups will outperform the sum of their individual contributions while others may underperform,” Ray said.

“Research is not able to tell managers how best to bring people together. So, this review is meant to point to places where we need more research to push beyond just ‘more is better,’ to be able to explain how you build human capital resources or how you more effectively use them.”

In another paper, “Human Capital Resources Emergence: The Role of Social Capital,” published last December in the Academy of Management Review, Ray and her co-authors take a broad view to look at the structure of how people are connected in a group.

“This is a theoretical paper that recognizes that we need to understand how the way we interact with our co-workers can help lead to the highest functioning group.

Several areas that are key to how social capital can create the highest functioning group, Ray said, are:

• How are people connected in the unit? Is it a large group or small group, and how frequently do connections interact?
• How much trust and camaraderie exist among members?
• Do members share a common institutional knowledge and language that allows them to communicate more efficiently?

“This paper advances the literature from thinking about just an abstract sense that people would need to communicate with each other to being precise about what needs to happen socially to make people come together as a group – in doing so, we can provide more precise and meaningful guidance to our students and to professionals.”