INSEAD Global Business Leaders Conference Europe : Converging on Competitiveness 28 june 2013 How do multinationals look at Europe ? Rajesh Krishnamurthy, Vice President, Global Head, Consulting and Systems Intergration, Retail, CPG, Logistics and Life Sciences, Infosys, Ltd Nick Leeder, MBA'95D, Managing Director, Google France Nunzio Mirtillo, Senior Vice President, Head of Region Mediterranean, Ericsson Presenters & Moderators : Javier Gimeno, Academic Director, INSEAD Charles Galunic, Aviva Chaired Professor of Leadership and Responsibility INSEAD
Charles Galunic, professor of organisational behaviour at Insead, defines the term social capital

Every week a business school professor, an expert in his or her field, defines a key term on FT Lexicon, our online economics, business and finance glossary.

Our professor this week

Charles Galunic is a professor of organisational behaviour at Insead, serving as professor of leadership and responsibility and director of Insead Executive Education’s Transition to General Management programme. He works in the fields of organisation behaviour and strategy and his research concerns the social fabric of innovation and change.

At the individual level, he has studied the influence of social networks on a manager’s ability to innovate. At a corporate level, he has studied structural changes and the processes which help firms to adapt. The latter work is also concerned with organisation culture, including its alignment with strategy, how it changes and the role of leadership. Finally, he is concerned with leadership transitions – that is, how managers develop their leadership skills and identity.

Prof Galunic has served on the editorial boards of Strategic Organisation and Strategic Management Journal, and has served as a former departmental editor for the Journal of International Business Studies. He has published in several academic and practitioner-oriented journals, including the Journal of Managerial and Decision Economics, Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Organisation Science, Strategic Management Journal, Harvard Business Review and Research in Organisational Behaviour.

Prof Galunic has been a pioneer of several courses at Insead, including the core MBA course in Managing Organisations. He has won best case awards, including the 2007 ECCH Best Case Award (organisational behaviour and human resources area). He also teaches in a variety of Insead executive programmes, both at Fontainebleau and in Asia, and is a programme director for Insead’s high potentials programme (MAP). He was a nominee for the Best Core Teacher Award, EMBA in 2004, 2005 and 2006 and received the 2004/05 Insead Excellence Award in Executive Education.

Prof Galunic holds a PhD in organisational behaviour and industrial engineering from Stanford University, California; a BA in philosophy, politics & economics from Oxford university (Canadian Rhodes Scholar); and a BSc in chemical engineering from Queen’s University, Canada.

You can follow him on Twitter on @CharlesGalunic.

Prof Galunic has chosen to define social capital.

Why it is important to understand social capital

“It is a well-worn cliché that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, but it is also misleading,” says Prof Galunic. He says such a naive view of social networks is as unhelpful as believing that only knowledge and content matter.

Prof Galunic says the expanding literature on social capital is providing fascinating, non-obvious, contingencies about social networks. “It’s well worth keeping an eye-on. Like capital of any sort, it requires work and development.”

To find out more about social capital, click on the links.

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