A New Conceptual Framework for Analyzing the Social Capital of Construction Project Teams

Team social capital plays a key role in positively affecting team performance. The construction project team is established temporarily to better achieve project targets, and the establishment and acquisition of its social capital became difficult in the process of construction because of the temporary characteristics. In the early stage of project construction, the construction project team often has a lot of implicit social capital which cannot be effectively utilized. Based on the Johari Window model in the cognitive psychology field, we propose a new model of construction project team’s social capital and divide the dimensions of a construction team’s social capital from a dynamic perspective, namely explicit social capital, private social capital, unknown social capital, and blind social capital. This paper explains the connotation of each type of social capital of the construction teams and discusses the strategies to transform the implicit social capital to explicit social capital, to provide the theoretical foundation and practical guidance for the establishment and cultivation of social capital in actual construction projects.