COVID-19, Organizational Social Capital, and Organizational Resiliency in Schools

• In Event: Pandemics and Organizational Dynamics in Schools

Abstract

Research has shown that organizational social capital is an important organizational resource that facilitates cooperation, increases efficiency, and fosters knowledge transfer among individuals within an organization (Inkpen & Tsang, 2005; Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998). It also increases the potential for organizational learning (Smylie & Evans, 2006) and for “successful collective action” or improvement (Leana & Barry, 2000, p. 755).

There is an emerging body of evidence to suggest that organizational social capital also has the potential to buffer organizations from external crises and threats, thus contributing to resiliency in organizations (Jia, Chowdhury, Prayag, & Chowdhury, 2020). There are few if any studies, however, about the relationship between organizational social capital and organizational resiliency in schools.

In this paper, we consider how the external crises created by COVID-19 impacted organizational social capital within schools, and we examine the relationship between social capital and organizational resiliency. The data for this paper were collected as part of a longitudinal four-year study of high schools in Texas that began prior to the pandemic, in 2019. The focus of the broader study was on the relationship between teacher turnover, organizational social capital, and school improvement efforts. For this paper, we focus on data collected during the pandemic, between June 2020 and February 2021. During this period, we conducted 33 interviews, 35 hours of observation, and collected 844 surveys (41 administrators, 608 teachers, and 195 other staff members).

Our findings indicate that schools, as organizations, were stressed significantly by the pandemic, as routines were upended, relationships strained, and roles and systems were thrown into chaos. Yet we also found that pre-existing relationships helped schools to weather the crisis, though these dynamics played out in complex ways. For example, teachers reported that their prior close connections with their immediate colleagues were a key source of support during the pandemic across our case study schools, but the relationships teachers who were outside of their immediate professional groups suffered the most. The pandemic also had a negative effect on relationships between teachers and leaders, relationships which were, in several schools, already precarious prior to the pandemic. As teachers became increasingly stressed about COVID exposure, school leaders reported that they were often the target of this anxiety. School leaders also reported difficulty communicating and building relationships with teachers, particularly with new teachers on campus, because the small interpersonal moments of interaction did not happen anymore. We also found that pre-existing distrust prior to the pandemic between leaders and teachers eroded more deeply in the pandemic year; while stronger relationships between teachers and leaders helped to maintain some level of trust throughout the year.

Ultimately, our study sheds light on the strain that the pandemic imposed on schools’ organizational social capital, and also illustrates how the uneven starting points prior to the pandemic, in terms of organizational social capital, impacted schools’ resiliency in the face of this crisis. These impacts, we argue, may impede school’s ability to emerge from this crisis, impacting both teacher retention and improvement efforts.

Authors

• Jennifer Jellison Holme, University of Texas at Austin

• Huriya Jabbar, University of Southern California

• Sarah De La Garza, University of Texas - San Antonio

• Katelin G. Trautmann, University of Texas at Austin

• Janet Solis Rodriguez, University of Texas at Austin