Research On The Affecting Mechanism Of Interorganizational Learning On Alliance Performance

Organizational learning is an effective means to maintain a high degree of flexibility among enterprises and to continuously improve the quality of enterprises to gain competitive advantage. Strategic alliance provides a platform for enterprises to exchange closely, organizational absorptive capacity helps firms acquire and assimilate knowledge from alliance, and relational capital plays an important role to promote the inter-organizational learning process. In this paper, we have inter-organizational learning, organizational absorptive capacity, relational capital, alliance performance as the basic elements of the study, from a dynamic perspective, to build an inter-organizational learning theoretic model during the evolution of strategic alliance. We discuss the elements themselves and the mechanism of the interaction of elements.This paper includes: first, the existing literature review of strategic alliances, organizational learning, absorptive capacity and relational capital, on the basis of the review summarized a clear logical relationship of elements; Secondly, to define the dimensions of elements. Third, build the model of strategic alliance, inter-organizational learning, absorptive capacity, relational capital and alliance performance, and propose assumptions of these elements. Test results are discussed and further clarified for future study.Innovation points of this paper are mainly reflected in the following aspects: First, we construct an integrated model of inter-organizational learning influence on alliance performance based on the evolution perspective of an alliance, the absorptive capacity and relationship capital as the moderating variable of the relationships between inter-organizational learning and alliance performance, and to analysis how to improve learning outcomes and alliance performance by absorptive capacity and relationship capital during different stages in the alliance, and perform an empirical study by domestic research data of high tech companies. Many previous studies focused on the influence of absorptive capacity, relational capital or inter-organizational learning on alliance performance alone, which lack of the moderating role of absorptive capacity, relational capital between inter-organizational learning and alliance performance, and there was no integration of these elements in a frame system. This study extends and deepens aspects of research on the inter-organizational learning improving alliance performance, to verify the moderating role of absorptive capacity and relational capital. Second, we focus on the dynamic perspective on alliance evolution, which is a relatively new research direction in the existing literature of inter-organizational learning to improve alliance performance. Strategic Alliance is a dynamic developing relationship. We divided the evolution of alliance into the development stage and mature stage, and to study the mechanism of inter-organizational learning on alliance performance from a dynamic perspective in different stages of the evolution of alliance, respectively, to study the relationships among inter-organizational learning, absorptive capacity, relational capital and alliance performance. By analyzing and summarizing our research findings, explains the importance and changes of each factor in different stages of alliance evolution, and states the absorptive capacity and relational capital can play a moderating role in some stage during alliance evolution. Third, we have the domestic high-tech industry as a research object, to perform the empirical study on the representative firms. As high-tech enterprises have characteristics of high technology, highly organizational and high intelligence-intensive and highly competitive, has more requirements for one or some aspects in high technology content, the demand of accessing to new technologies from outside the enterprise for knowledge and information are more obvious than other sectors. Therefore, we perform empirical analysis focused on the high-tech enterprise alliance, and selected the most representative enterprises of the IT companies and biomedical research enterprises as research samples, to refine and deepen the research scope of inter-organizational Learning in strategic alliances, which can make clear the factors that can improve alliance performance and its changes in various stages of alliance evolution, these can be instructive and practical significance for the industry.