The paper develops a new perspective in social capital theory by outlining the significance of social capital for organizational development and change. Different mechanisms of economic coordination such as markets, hierarchies and teams have been shown to exhibit various and consistent social capital-dependence. Accordingly, insufficient amount of social capital is predicted to make highly social capital-dependent mechanism infeasible. This conceptual framework has been applied to the empirical context of organizational development in Ukrainian agricultural enterprises and rural communities. Although the first test of available empirical data revealed the existence of differential social capital-dependencies of organizational forms, as well as a significant correlation between enterprise level social capital and a number of organizational parameters, the data do not fully support the proposed theory of social capital-dependence. Further research, both conceptual and empirical, is necessary.