Building Social Capital in a Multibusiness Firm

Realizing synergies across different businesses is a mulitbusiness firm’s generic strategic challenge. Eva Bilhuber Galli investigates the role of social capital in cross-business collaboration and how to build it effectively with leadership development practices. Studying a case of a large multibusiness firm, she comes to counter-intuitive conclusions: 1) Not all types of cross-business collaboration require the same intensity level of social capital. 2) To build strong forms of social capital, single networking events seem to fall short. The alignment of practices over time needs to be considered.