World Applied Sciences Journal 18 (3): 317-321, 2012

ISSN 1818-4952
IDOSI Publications, 2012
DOI: 10.5829/idosi.wasj.2012.18.03.1109

The Relationship Between Social Capital and Intrapreneurship in

General Administration of Physical Education of Khorasan Province, Iran
Shima Behnoosh
Department of Physical Education, Urmia University, Iran
Abstract: This study aims to investigate the relationship between social capital and intrapreneurship in General
Administration of Physical Education of Khorasan province. This research is of descriptive-correlational type
by the field method. For data collection, a reliable and valid questionnaire was applied. Statistical society and
sample were the same, including all employees of the General Administration of Physical Education of Khorasan
province. Generally, the results showed that there is a positive and significant relationship between social
capital factors (structure and quality) and organizational level entrepreneurship. Also, there was a positive
relationship between intrapreneurship factors (new business or venture, innovativeness, Self-renewal, risk
taking, proactiveness, competitive aggressiveness) and social capital. Thus, there is a 2-tailed correlation
between social capital and intrapreneurship as managers can enhance the capacity of entrepreneurial activities
in their organization by considering social capital between individuals within organization.
Key words: Social capital

Intrapreneurship

Sport organization

INTRODUCTION

efforts of one key manager[5]. Like the other

organizations, Sport organizations cannot rely on
conducting major organizational change programs, but
need to create organizations that continuously improve,
renew, adapt and change. Hence there is a need for
creativity, innovation and intrapreneurship. And due to
the importance of General Administration of Physical
Education that is in charge and coordinator of sport
programmes in a province, it seems to be essential to have
a culture of intrapreneurship within the organization.
According to Antoncic and Hisrich (2001),
Intrapreneurship can be integrated and classified into
eight dimensions: new business, new venture,
product/service innovativeness, process innovativeness,
self-renewal, risk taking, proactiveness and competitive
aggressiveness. Regardless of size of the organization,
new business venturing refers to the creation of new
businesses within an existing organization by redefining
the companys products of services. Different levels of
autonomy are found by new business venturing like
internal venturing, corporate start-ups, autonomous
business unit creation, spin offs and new streams.
Innovativeness refers to product and service innovation
with emphasis on development and innovation in
technology. In this dimension the dependency of
technology is of great importance. Through the

Finding creative and innovative methods and

approaches for increasing efficiency is one of the main
concerns of current organizations. One method to realize
this objective is strengthening entrepreneurship and
paving the way for its development [1]. Entrepreneurship
is the process of stimulating and making the best use of
the clerks in an organization. A process using which the
clerks think that they are able to do things differently and
better. Obstacles in flexibility, development and
innovation can be overcome by increasing the spirit of
entrepreneurship
within
organizations.
Training
entrepreneurs within organizations requires providing
propitious circumstances and spreading the spirit of
entrepreneurship [2]. And, one growing entrepreneurship
research
sub-field
is
intraprenuership,
i.e.
entrepreneurship in existing organizations [3]. Overall, the
focus of intrapreneurship is on employees at multiple
levels engaging in some level of entrepreneurial activity the crux of intrapreneurship is that opportunities must be
identified and pursued by individuals within the firm
[4]. As Miller (1983) noted there is continually a need
for organizational renewal, innovation, constructive
risk taking and the conceptualization and pursuit of new
opportunities, a pursuit that often goes beyond the

Corresponding Author: Shima Behnoosh, Department of Physical Education, Urmia University, Iran.

317

World Appl. Sci. J., 18 (3): 317-321, 2012

development or purchase of new technologies new

products and services can be developed. Technology
drive is the essence of this dimension. The self-renewal
dimension refers to the transformation of the organization
through the renewal of key ideas on which they are built
[6]. This renewal implies the redefinition of business
concepts, reorganization and the redefinition and redesign
of systems to foster innovation [7]. The risk taking
dimension refers to the quick pursuit of opportunities,
fast commitment of resources and bold actions [8]. The
concept of proactiveness refers to the extent to which
organizations attempt to lead rather than follow
competitors in such key business areas as the
introduction of new products or services, operating
technologies and administrative techniques [9]. The last
dimension, competitive aggressiveness, is deal with an
aggressive organizational relationship to its competitors
[3].
Another concept is concerned in this paper is social
capital. The social capital plays a main role in the progress
of our society when we face an implied and complex
knowledge [10]. Cohen and Prusak (2001) believe that
social capital emphasises on the relationship between the
people. Some factors such as confidence, joint values and
behaviors by which the human network and social
network are joined to each other, make the cooperation
possible. Also, social capital exists differently in every
organization. Organizations can not perform their duties
without social capital. There are several methods by
which social capital can be profitable for the organization.
These methods include: Sharing knowledge better,
decreasing the expenses of transfer, decreasing the
degree of exchange and increasing the integrity of the
performance because of the joint perception of the
organization [11]. Coleman stated that Social capital
resides in the relational structure between and among
persons. In Social Capital in the creation of Human
Capital, Coleman focuses on social capital as a resource
for persons, but clearly indicates social capital can also be
a resource for organizations [12]. Social capital is a multidimensional concept that emphasises both the quality and
structure of social relationships. In social capital terms,
both network structure and quality of relationships are
thought to be important in achieving various outcomes
[13]. The quality of social relationships refers to the extent
to which they are characterised by norms of trust and
reciprocity. Clearly, trust and reciprocity within the
institutional realm are the norms governing peoples
confidence in institutions. These norms concern trust in
the formal institutions of governance and markets and
include, for example, fairness of rules and official
procedures [14]. Social capital theory also argues that
318

the structure of networks is important. Structural

characteristics of networks include the size of the
network, the density of social ties within the network and
the diversity of the backgrounds and social situations
of the network members [13]. And, as sport and
recreation provides opportunities and settings for social
interaction, sharing common interests and enhancing a
sense of community, social capital can be considered
within sport organizations. Little research has, however,
been done on the role of entrepreneurship, or rather
entrepreneurship and social capital within the
organizations. As Audretsch and Keilbach (2004) argue
that most of the research on social capital and
entrepreneurship does not adequately link these two
concepts. Thus, it has not been enough to explain the
positive contribution of social capital to organizational
level entrepreneurship empirically. Nonetheless, the
definition offered by Stone and Lock Lee in social capital
and Antoncic and Hisrich in Organizational level
entrepreneurship (which has been adopted widely) will
be used in this report. And the main objective of this
paper is the question that: Is there any relationship
between social capital and intrapreneurship in a sport
organization?
MATERIALS AND METHODS
According to the purpose, this study is in the
category of applied research and according to the
data collection procedure is in the category of descriptive
research and correlation. The population of this study
includes all the clerks of General Administration of
Physical Education of Khorasan province (N=67). The
sample number equals statistical society. For collecting
data, a self-report questionnaire of intrapreneurship
and social capital composed of 40 items by Ashena (2005)
with factors including "new business or venture",
"innovativeness", "risk taking", " Self- renewal",
"proactiveness" and "competitive aggressiveness" for
intrapreneurship and "quality" and "structure" for social
capital was used. In order to determine the validity of the
5-point Likert scale questionnaire, Cronbach's alpha was
used. The Cronbach's alpha for intrapreneurship and
Social capital factors were 0.85. Also, personal information
questionnaires were used to determine demographic
information (age, sex, marital status, education level and
job records). To describe the variables, descriptive
statistics like, mean, percentage, variance and standard
deviations were used. To test the hypothesis, linear,
normal homogeneity variances and score independence
were resulted by Colmograf Smirnof tests and correlation
coefficient of Spearman.

World Appl. Sci. J., 18 (3): 317-321, 2012

Table 1: Correlation coefficient between intrapreneurship and factors of social capital
Variables

Structure

Quality

Intrapreneurship
Sig. (2-tailed)

0.82**
0.000

0.75**
0.000

**. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).

Table 2: Correlation coefficient between social capital and factors of intrapreneurship
Variables
Social capital
Sig. (2-tailed)

New business or venture

Innovativeness

Risk taking

Self-renewal

Proactiveness

Competitive aggressiveness

0.82**
0.000

0.76**
0.000

0.58**
0.000

0.73**
0.000

0.69**
0.000

0.62**
0.000

**.Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

and a collective resource, social capital enables or

disables entrepreneurial activities [16]. Adonisi (2003)
showed that there is a meaningful relationship between
trust (of factors of social capital) and entrepreneurship
[22]. Also Farahani and Falahati (2007) indicated that trust
among clerks and manager in a sport organization
increases entrepreneurship [23]. Since trust enhances
ideas generation by facilitating interactions between
individuals within organizations and between
organizations [15]. And according to Knack and Keefer
(1997), if organization within a country has a high level of
mutual trust, confidential information exchange can be
facilitated with other organizations [24]. This is because
the risk that one actor will opportunistically exploit
confidential information to disadvantage another actor is
reduced [25]. In addition, the structure (of social capital
factors) of an organization importantly influences the flow
of information and the context and nature of human
interactions [26]. Therefore, it can affect organizational
level entrepreneurship (intrapreneurship). The results also
showed that there is a positive correlation between
dimensions of intrapreneurship and social capital. It is
observed that among intrapreneurship factors, new
business or venture and risk taking represent the highest
and the lowest correlation with social capital, respectively.
This result matches with Heilbrunn (2005), s study. As
Heilbrunn (2005) in a research entitled Entrepreneurship,
social capital and community development: the case study
of the Israeli Kibbutz found that entrepreneurial process
itself fasters social capital development and contributes
thereby to a communitys capacity [27]. High social
capital can provide entrepreneurs to access information,
cooperation and trust from others increasingly [28]. Social
capital is important to intrapreneurship because it
encourages employees to take risks without fear of
sanction.
In conclusion, at sport organizations, considering
structure and quality of social capital, managers will be
able to foster intrapreneurship and contribute to flow of
information in organization. So, on the basis of the

Data analysis tests showed a positive and significant

correlation at 0.01 level, between social capital factors,
quality and structure and intrapreneurship (Table 1).
As can be seen in the table, among intrapreneurship
factors new business or venture (0.82), innovativeness
(0.76), Self- renewal (0.73), proactiveness (0.69),
competitive aggressiveness (0.62) and risk taking (0.58)
have the highest and lowest correlation with social
capital, respectively (Table 2).
The results showed a positive and significant relation
between social capital factors (structure and quality) and
intrapreneurship in General Administration of Physical
Education of Khorasan province. It means increasing
social capital within a sport organization causes
increasing of intrapreneurship. This result matches with
Doh and Zolnik (2011), Frahanie and Flahati (2007),
Westlund (2006), Adonisi (2003), s studies. Doh and
Zolnik in a research entitled Social capital and
entrepreneurship: An exploratory analysis indicated that
there is a meaningful and positive relationship between
social capital and entrepreneurship [15]. As social capital
promotes knowledge production and exchange in
research, education and commercial R&D processes [16].
Thus, social capital has been regarded as an important
driver of entrepreneurship. Also, researched by Aldrich
and Martinez (2003) and Audretsch and Keilbach (2004)
contend that, theoretically, social capital plays an
important role in entrepreneurship [17,18]. Social capital
perspective presumes that network ties provide
individuals or organizations with access to knowledge
and other useful resources [19]. Therefore, social capital
captures the networking between individuals or between
individuals and organizations as well as the useful
resources which can be drawn from these networks [20].
So, social capital contributes to reducing the ambiguity
associated with entrepreneurial decisions [21].
Furthermore Westlund (2006) stated that social capital has
direct effects on entrepreneurship. Both as an individual
319

World Appl. Sci. J., 18 (3): 317-321, 2012

findings of the research, managers are recommended to

strengthen social capital among their staff to attain better
atmosphere for entrepreneurial activities at their
organization.
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