The role of teams in the evolution of social capital

Teams are increasingly central to how individuals build social capital, yet research on social capital formation has largely emphasized dyadic tie building rather than the network opportunities embedded in team experiences. We develop a structural holes argument in which prior team memberships shape individuals’ subsequent ability to span nonredundant contacts, and we theorize that these effects are contingent on members’ prior social capital and on inequality in teammates’ social capital. We test the model using a longitudinal dataset of attorneys staffing the largest U.S. legal transactions from 2001 to 2009 (18,985 attorneys in 1,173 law firms and 507 legal teams), where ties are defined by co-membership on transaction teams. We operationalize social capital as structural holes (the inverse of Burt’s constraint) and estimate fixed-effects models using nonoverlapping past (three-year moving window) and current (focal year) measures. Results indicate that team-based social capital benefits are disproportionately captured by individuals with greater prior structural holes, who gain more from both teams with higher average structural holes and from greater dispersion in teammates’ structural holes. These findings position teams as a key mechanism in the evolution of individual social capital and illuminate how team design can amplify cumulative advantage in network positions.