From busy bees to science geeks and party animals

In this paper, we focus on the importance of social relations for the performance of individuals and, more specifically, for the academic performance of doctoral students in Slovenia. The basic assumption here, which also finds support in the literature, is that a person's performance largely depends on the relationships they have with important others within the organization. An individual's performance is also the result of individual traits such as competence, intelligence, experience, attitudes and personality. In this paper we are interested in how these different social (network) and individual factors shape the performance of doctoral students in Slovenia. On the basis of several factors established in previous studies we formulate a typology of Slovenian doctoral students. The study was conducted on a sample of 117 doctoral students in Slovenia. The data were collected in 2003 as part of the International Network on Social Capital and Performance (INSOC) research project. The results show that a clustering into five groups is the optimal solution and confirms some findings of previous studies. Good integration into the research group, a good relationship with the supervisor, a strong motivation to do the PhD, and the importance of the work seem to be the factors most beneficial to academic performance. However, the results also reveal that social relationship and attitudinal indicators have a more complex and not always a linear relationship with performance.