Market knowledge, social capital and absorptive capacity: An analysis of knowledge spillovers within marketing departments

Acknowledgement. We thank the management and employees of the three research sites for their cooperation, and An analysis of knowledge spillovers within marketing departments This paper investigates how marketing professionals' intra-departmental social network is associated with their knowledge about customers, competitors, and technology. There are three findings. First, we find no consistent effects for ego-network density or central brokerage position, the two network characteristics that have dominated social capital research. Second, however, we find stronger effect for social network exposure to others' knowledge, a rather under-researched facet of social capital which we model using network autoregression. These two findings support recent conjectures that brokerage positions and trust need not always lead to superior outcomes and that, in some contexts, social capital is better conceived as access to others' resources. Our third finding is that individuals' extant knowledge has a positive effect on learning from peers in the technology domain, but a negative effect in the customer and competitor domains. This suggests that the professionals studied were realizing positive returns on their own intellectual capital for learning outside their primary task environment, but negative returns for learning within their primary task environment.