Exploring how social capital and self-esteem shape career success among women in a patriarchal African society: the case of Nigeria

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this research is to investigate how bridging and bonding social capital relate to career success among career women in a patriarchal African society. Further, the intervening role of self-esteem in the association between social capital and career success was examined.Design/methodology/approach Structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 488 Nigerian career women in management cadres in both private and public sectors. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was applied in testing the proposed hypotheses.Findings The outcomes show that bridging social capital has a significant positive relationship with subjective and objective career success. Conversely, bonding social capital has no significant positive relationship with subjective and objective career success. Further analyses show that self-esteem only partially mediates the association between bridging social capital and career success while an insignificant intervening effect of self-esteem on the association between bonding social capital and career success was found.Practical implications The findings suggest the need for organisations to stimulate a friendly work environment that has a zero-tolerance culture for workplace discrimination against women. This will enable the women to relate with people in the workplace irrespective of gender or cadre to generate more bridging social capital to achieve greater career success.Originality/value The study extends social capital and career success research to career women in a patriarchal African context as a response to the call for context-specific career research in non-western countries particularly Africa. Second, the study provides empirical evidence that African career woman with bridging social capital can achieve career success irrespective of their self-esteem level amid patriarchal discrimination.

Pengaruh Brand Love Pada Brand Loyalty Serta Peran Self-Esteem, Dan Susceptibility to Normatif Influence

“…Keterkaitan produk kepada self-esteem menaikan dampak positif atas keselarasan dan integrasi merek pada keterikatan merek emosional (Flynn, 2003). Self-esteem akan meningkatan kepuasan dan komitmen untuk menggunakan merek tersebut dan meningkatkan loyalitas terhadap merek tersebut (Imhanrenialena & Cross, 2022). Karena itu, pelanggan yang memiliki sosial yang tinggi menimbulkan kepedulian kepada citra merek serta akan tertarik dengan apa dipikirkan orang kepada merek.…”

Addressing virtual work challenges through women’s innate compassionate managerial leadership behaviors: the case of Nigeria

“…Fourth, conducting this study on African women managers' compassionate behaviors in a unique work environment that is characterized by patriarchal discrimination against women (Imhanrenialena et al, 2022) further enhances the robustness of the theoretical contributions as it is documented that cultural diversity is one of the major characteristics of virtual work environments (Hoch and Kozlowski, 2014;Bhat et al, 2017;Imhanrenialena et al, 2021). Therefore, demonstrating that Nigerian female managers still use their innate compassionate behaviors to address their subordinates' isolation, trust and turnover intention challenges amid patriarchal discrimination in Nigerian organizations is a great addition to the literature on gender in management.…”

“…This is important because the outcomes of this study indicate that virtual work environments hold better career prospects for women based on their innate compassionate characteristics. Fourth, the patriarchal Nigerian society (Imhanrenialena et al , 2022) needs to drop patriarchal discrimination against women by giving them equal career opportunities, particularly in virtual work settings, to fully harness their innate compassionate attributes.…”

“…First, the use of the purposive sampling technique in determining the sample size makes the sample’s representativeness of the entire population unclear, which in turn limits the generalizability of the outcomes to the entire women population. This limitation was caused by a lack of authoritative data on the number of Nigerian virtual workers and women managers in Nigerian virtual work environments (Imhanrenialena et al , 2022; Imhanrenialena et al , 2021). For stronger generalizability of these outcomes to women managers in other cultures, we suggest that future research should replicate this study in countries that have authoritative, finite data on the population of virtual workers.…”

Social Capital development amongst college and university students in online and classroom education

“…Social capital, as developed into networking, relationship formation and information accessibility, is an important success factor in career, business and personal development [10,11,18]. In the context of business, social capital forms the basis of business networks that is crucial for business development and personal growth [18,19]. Among the benefits of business networks are shared knowledge, opportunities, connections, increased confidence and raised profile [9,20].…”