Secondhand social capital: Boundary spanning, secondhand closure, and individual performance.

•Job performance is influenced by secondhand social capital—i.e., by the networks of one’s contacts.•High performance occurs when contacts in different business units have the cooperative motivation to share novel knowledge.•Secondhand closure, when one’s contacts are embedded in densely interconnected networks, yields performance advantages.•Bridging intra-organizational boundaries provides knowledge novelty spillovers; secondhand closure provides cooperation.•Secondhand closure is disaggregated into two sources of contacts’ constraint: reputation concerns and superordinate identity.