The Weakness of Weak Ties: Do Social Capital Investments among Leaders Pay Off During Times of Disaster?

Abstract

The theoretical literature on social capital and disasters, as well as conventional wisdom, suggests the importance of pre-disaster relationship building among leaders of responding organizations and agencies for disaster readiness and response. Often implied, but rarely tested empirically, research presumes a positive and linear relationship associated with investments in social capital for effective disaster response. Any amount of relationship building is better than none, but more is better. But is it? In this article, we use a rare longitudinal, pre-post disaster dataset of dyadic ties among leaders to examine key questions related to investments in social capital before a disaster, the expected payoffs from these investments, the actual payoffs of these investments and the marginal effects of such investments. Our findings indicate that pre-disaster relationship building has a non-linear relationship to expected payoffs and actual payoffs. Marginal effects analyses suggests three interesting, though perhaps counter-intuitive, relationships between the investment and expected and actual payoffs in social capital. First, leaders reported expecting disproportionately high payoffs from relatively small relationship investments prior to the disaster. Second, infrequent pre-disaster interactions were found to be no different than no prior interaction when looking at actual payoffs from these investments. Finally, relationships that were deemed most problematic were among those with weak ties. Overall, results suggest that the efficacy of pre-disaster relationship building is more complicated than one would expect based on extant literature. More investment in social capital may be better in some cases, but the benefits from these investments appear only after a certain threshold is met and, in some cases, may have diminishing returns. Potential theoretical drivers for these seemingly counter-intuitive findings are discussed while calling for further research to investigate these dynamics in other contexts.