**3.1. Personal SC**

The first level of SC refers to the individual's profit from his/her positioning in social networks [17] inside and outside of the organization. Stofer et al. [18] defined personal SC as the set of resources that individuals bring to the performance of their tasks through their own personal relations.

Personal SC is measured by parameters such as the number of social relationships the individual maintains in the organization and their hierarchical level, the number of social events to which he/she is invited, the degree to which he/she attends these events, and the individual's involvement in various activities in the organization, est. [19, 20].

The concept of personal SC leans on Granovetter's network theory [21]. The main difference between the position of an actor in the network and personal SC is the emphasis on the outcomes—the "capital," which the individual wins due to his/her position in the social network.

However, as Aghajanian [50] explained, all forms of social capital cannot be incorporated under one heading, rather there need to be a separation and narrowing down the measurements to achieve meaningful results. For example, individuals experience conflict differently than groups, and thus, their levels of social capital are likely to change differently. Therefore, we need to inspect the different relationship between every level of SC and conflicts in organizations.

Conflicts and Social Capital in Organizations http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.73387 57

A person with a lot of personal SC is probably a person with many friends, and indeed, in organizations, it is possible that a high portion of personal SC results due to expert positioning outside or inside the organizations or formal power (such as managerial or high rank positioning), but the social component is very important in amassing personal SC. Usually, a person with many friends has the practical knowledge of how not to get involved in harmful conflicts [51]. Moreover, personal SC may contribute to avoiding conflicts generally. For example, Guo et al. [52] found that the more friends Chinese older adults in the United States have, the less conflicts they have with their spouse and family. On the other hand, affective conflicts ("A-type") are usually personal and based on hurt feelings; therefore, they are being created in the personal SC level. Ibarra et al. [53] thought that this dilemma could be answered only by relating the different SC levels at the same time, they created a 2 × 2 matrix in which they presented the possibilities of the interactions between high and low personal SC and high and low intraorganizational SC. If a person has high personal SC and high intraorganizational SC, then this person's situation is ideal and most of his/her conflicts are "C-type" conflicts. If, however, the person has a low personal SC and low intraorganizational SC, then he/ she does not connect with others and has bad relationships with them. If he/she has conflicts, they are "A-type" conflicts because his/her communication with others is bad. If this person has low personal SC and high intraorganizational SC, a rare situation that can be found in totalitarian institutions such as a monastery, then there might be some few "A-type" conflicts, but they would not harm the organization or the groups in it. This perspective was supported by Gilligany et al. [54], who found that people who suffer from conflicts in the personal level tend to have less conflicts in the community level if this community has high SC. The fourth possibility was if this person has high personal SC and low intraorganizational SC, then he/ she will have an "A-type" conflicts with people that are not in his/her "in group" or if his/her personal goals contradict the group's goals [55], Ibarra et al. [53] called this kind of conflict "a tragedy of commons"; they claimed that this situation can be especially harmful to the man-

agement of the organizations. In **Table 1**, all four combinations are presented.

**Low High**

**Table 1.** The interactions of personal and intraorganizational SC with conflict type, adapted from Ibarra et al. [53].

Network congruence "C-type" conflicts

Total institution Very few conflicts

**Personal SC Intraorganizational SC**

High Tragedy of commons

Low Atomized market

"A-type" conflicts

"A-type" conflicts

**4.1. Personal SC and conflicts**

Shipley and Berry [22] proved that individuals who have high levels of personal SC receive more social benefits than the individuals who have low levels of personal SC. Some of these benefits in organizations are as follows: the status of the individual in the organization [23] receiving information and knowledge, amassing personal power, finding jobs and promotion—both within and between organizations [20, 24], and even earning higher salary [25].
