Social relationships of both managers and creative workers in the context of value creation (Relacje spoleczne kadry zarzadzajacej oraz pracownikow kreatywnych w kontekscie tworzenia wartosci)

This paper refers to the significance and the level of exploitation of social relationships for value creation processes in the case of video game developers. The aim of the article is to present empirical findings on the level and structure of social relationships maintained by both managerial and creative workers inside and outside companies. The results show that social relationships maintained by both types of employees are used during video game development processes; however, creative workers’ informal relations seem to play a more important role. Furthermore, it is indicated that internal social relationships are more important for video game developers in their core activity than those maintained outside their boundaries. Given the current stock of knowledge, the findings confirm prior, qualitative research on video game developers as well as reinforce prior results about the importance of social relationships in other industry contexts. Beside the above, this paper contributes to the existing literature as it provides: (1) a detailed description of the video game development process from the perspective of engaged employees, (2) a proposition of four-dimensional typology of social relationships characteristic of companies in creative industries, (3) a proposition of an extended typology of research in the network approach within strategic management, and (4) identification of future research challenges related to the exploration of social relationships from a strategic management perspective by applying social network analysis (SNA).