Is the performance improvement effect of social capital contingent on life cycle stages of professional athletes? Evidence from motorboat racing in Japan

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine whether bonding and bridging social capital of professional athletes affect their performance and whether the impacts vary according to their life cycle stages. Design/methodology/approach - This study establishes an unbalanced panel of motorboat racers in Japan, and estimates a fixed-effects negative binomial regression model to analyze determining factors in the number of wins in a final, focusing on not only physical factors but also social capital. Findings - Bridging social capital, measured by the number of racers in the same regional division, has no impact on performance. Bonding social capital, measured by the number of racers who graduated the training institute in the same period, has positive impacts on performance. This positive effect is more salient among racers who are less experienced, and thus need to extract benefits from social capital to augment limited internal resources. Originality/value - This study adds statistical evidence to previous literature on the contingency theory that different types of social capital have different impacts on performance under different environments.