PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF UNIVERSITIES’ SOCIAL CAPITAL CONSOLIDATION

Abstract

The article considers the conceptual issues for psychological studying various forms of social capital consolidation within universities. The main aspects of social capital consolidation are university reputation, trust, commitment to university goals, identification with the university, organizational culture, and an opportunity to put personal motives into life. The main goal of this paper is to examine the peculiarities of social capital consolidation in three Russian leading universities and to make theoretical conclusions to confirm our model of organizations’ social capital components. The article step by step studies the concept of university’s social capital and its connection with both organizational culture and reputation. An organization’s social capital and its consolidation are defined; the basic components of social capital for representatives of different university subcultures (students, administrative staff, and faculty) in three leading Russian highly-ranked universities are named according to the research. There is described the interrelation between the university’s reputation and the opportunities to put personal motives into life, the dynamics of the social capital formation for students in Russian universities and determinants of socialization for employees in higher educational institutions. In order to make managerial decisions and conduct further empirical studies, all the phenomena are considered according to their psychological contents, the research objects (leading Russian universities) taken into account. Altogether 590 people participated in this study. Various statistical methods are used: content analysis, ANOVA (analysis of variance), correlation and regression methods. The research showed that the consolidation of universities’ social capital combines both internal and external focuses of this phenomenon that can be presented via reputation characteristics, for instance, «reputational platform», a combination of clan and market cultures as well as socialization (trust, organizational commitment and identification). This concept can be considered as a positive basis to understand different managerial problems and find focused efforts to solve them. This article contributes to understanding psychological aspects of university management and to studying its cumulative social capital, which can significantly improve university’s reputation, as well as its competitive advantages within entrepreneurial environment.