Study On The Impact Of Enterprise's Internal Social Capital On Employee Performance

In recent years, many scholars discussed the positive impact of the enterprise's internal social capital to its technology innovation, knowledge creation and the growth of the business, but paid less attention to the affect of the internal social capital on employee's performance. This, to some extent, increases the ambiguity of the internal social capital and the enterprise performance. On the other hand, in the field of the theory research and management practice, most people paid more attention to the decisive role of the employee's personality and the formal system, but ignored the role of enterprise's social environment, especially the impact of the elements of the internal social capital on the employee performance. As a part of the informal system of the enterprise, the internal social capital not only has an impact on the organization but also, which is more important, its first influencing object is the employee, because the internal social capital stems from the employee's social ties and psychological envirment, reflects the employee's perceived reciprocity, norms, obligations, expectations and the psychological comfort level when asking for help. So, it would have the direct and profound impact to the employees. Further, when it brings the psychological and behavioral changes of the employees, it can also make the different results of the employee performance. Therefore, the research on the impact of internal social capital on employee performance not only can make up for the shortcoming of the present theoretical research, but also can provide the theoretical guidance for the management practice.Based on the thought of the theory and practice, the paper explores the impact of the enterprise's internal social capital on the employee performance. The paper mainly solves four questions:the first is the construct and the measuring elements of the enterprise's internal social capital;the second is digging the decisive factors of the employee performance based on the social exchange theory, psychology constract etc.; the third is the impact mechanism and relationship between the elements of the internal social capital and the employee's performance; the fourth is the emperical research so that the paper got the final conclusions.Chapter 3 analyzes the construct and the measuring elements of the internal social capital. The collectivism culture in China makes the individuals more sensitive to "inner group" than to "outer group". So, it is easy for the closed systems such as enterprise to form informal social monitoring environment and the internal social capital. In addition, the Chinese gives special attention to "Guanxi" and the interpersonal harmony in the work environment and lives with the "Guanxi". And the "Guanxi" can promote the formation of the internal social capital of the enterprise. So, the paper, from the structration theory, discusses the formation mechanism of it and then defines the concept, the structure and the measuring elements and so on based on the literature, the culture and the interview. These can explain the inevitability of the internal social capital influencing the employee performance and indicate the diversity of the beneficiaries of the internal social capital.Chapter 4 analyzes the employee performance and its decisive factors. And digs the mediating variables:the environment promotes or hinders employee performance indirectly by influencing individual's motivation and special knowledge. The motivation and the special knowledge are the mediating variables. Then, the paper analyzes the impact mechanism and the specific relationship between the internal social capital and employee performance and contructs the concepts model based on the theoretical analysis. The internal social capital builds the social conditions of the individual's behaviors through embedding the trust and relationship into the complex socio-economic system, and ultimately affects the behavior choice of the individuals. The different elements impact the employee performance through the mediating variables:the structural elements provide the employees the opportunities for knowledge acquisition through the provision of information distribution channels. It can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the knowledge acquisition behavior. The common knowledge flowing through the social ties also influence the employee's psychological perceptions. The relational elements provide the safe social environment for the employee's behavior and are the base of the psychological contract. The cognitive elements provide a top-level concept for knowledge acquisition and the psychological contract, which enables employees to choose their behavior and form communicating habits according to the organization's values. Based on the theoretical analysis, the paper constructs the theoretical model and thus, links up the social capital and employee performance by the mediators.Chapter 5 and chapter 6 design the emperical research and analyze the data. The sample data is from different enterprises of Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, Jinan, Qingdao, Zibo, and so on. At the same time, considering the superiority of the structural equation modeling (SEM) to the general regression analysis, the study uses SEM which is widely used in sociology, psychology and organizational behavior disciplines. The softwares used in the paper are AMOS7.0 and SPSS216.0.Through the theoretical analysis and empirical research, the study achieves the following conclusions:(1) The process which the internal social capital affecting the employee performance is an indirect process. The internal social capital which embedes in the formal system of the enterprise is derived from individual ties and it will have an indirect impact to the employee through the mediators. The empirical analysis validates that the theoretical relationship model is reasonable. (2) The Internal social capital has a positive impact on the employee performance. Through the theoretical analysis, the paper advances that different elements of the internal social capital have the positive impact on the different indicators of the employee performance through the intermediating variables--knowledge acquisition and psychological contract. The empirical analysis based on the big sample data verifiies this conclusion. However, the empirical findings of this study illustrates that the psychological contract's direct impact on employee's innovation is not significant. That is, the relationship which employee perceived does not directly promote the realization of innovation, but indirectly influence the employee performance through knowledge acquisition. (3) The different elements of the internal social capital do not have the same impact on the different indicators of the employee performance. Not same as the theoretical analysis, the empirical analysis shows that the different aspect of the internal social capital has the different impact ability to employee performance. Some is very large, such as the network cohesion and trust have the large coefficient to psychological contract; Network range has the large coefficient to the knowledge acquisition. While some others have little impact on the psychological contract, such as the network-range has the relatively small coefficient to the psychological contract. These results suggest that if the enterprise develops the different elements proportionly, some inputs will be wasted, or the positive effects will be held down by some elements. Therefore, a reasonable stock of the internal social capital is more meaningful to the employee and the enterprise.Comparing to the present research, the paper achieves the innovations from three aspects:Firstly, it enucleates the impact of the internal social capital on the employee performance from the perspective of the theory of social capital in the domestic "Guanxi" culture. So, it not only deepens the research level but also widens the research scope of the influencing factors of the employee performance. Considering the "Guanxi" culture, it will have an important function to individual's social interaction and the personal relationship. The individual in the "Guanxi" situation pay more attention to the personal action and the "Guanxi" harmony. The individual's information acquisition and psychology perception not only are influenced by the formal contract but also by "Guanxi". At the same time, the domestic culture can promote the formation of the internal social capital. So, as the many researches focused on the impact of the personality, the formal system and the structure to the employee performance, the paper analyzes the relationship between the internal social capital and the employee performance. Therefore, it promotes the impact factors research of the employee performance facing to the social capital elements, and changing from focusing on individual level factors and the formal system to the organizational level. So, it deepens the research level and widens the research scope of the influencing factors of the employee performance.Secondly, it constructs the theoretical relationship model between the internal social capital and the employee performance, and makes the theoretical and empirical analysis systematically and comprehensively. So, it makes the current research more systemtic and comprehensive. Many scholars accepted that the social capital in the closed network can promote the individual's collaboration and the collectivity, but the research at the present has not made the systematic research and short of empirical test to the micro efficiency of the internal social capital which comes from the closed network. The paper based on the theory of the psychology, the social exchange and the psychology contract and so on, digs the mediating variables which the internal social capital influencing the employee performance. Then, the paper constructs and tests the theoretical model through the specific analysis of the relationship between the different elements of the internal social capital and the different indicators of the employee performance. So, it promots the present research more systematicly and comprehensively.Thirdly, the paper explains the micro function of the internal social capital comprehensively and systematically and makes the empirical test, it opens the "black box" of the internal social capital affecting the enterprise's performance. Research on the relationship between the internal social capital and the enterprise's performance makes the formation reason of their relationship fuzzy. Although the internal social capital is a concept of the organization level, it bases on the individual's ties and reflects the individual's psychology process and the state, and constructs the social context of the employee's behavior. So, it will have the direct impact to the employee. The paper explains the inevitability and availability of the internal social capital affecting the employee's psychology and the behavior and the performance by theoretical analysis and empirical test with the different area's enterprise employees. This not only expands the category of the efficiency research of the enterprise internal social capital, but also verifies the conversion function of the macro-micro of the internal social capital in the closed network. Therefore, it opens out the "black box" of the internal social capital influencing the enterprise performance.Although the paper adopts the scientific and normative research procedure and methods, there are some shortcomings inevitably. So, the future research may focus on:(1) Distinguishing the employee of the different function so that we can find out the accurte stock of the structural social capital of the different function department. (2) Making the empirical test with the longitudinal data and HLM. The longitudinal data can find out the dynamic relationship or the non liner relationship. And, although the employee judging the internal social capital can avoid the warp of the organization judging, it can be organized on the level of the organization and can be analized with HLM. At same time, the future research should explore how to construct the mechanism of the promotion and the protection of the enterprise internal social capital, so that we can get benefit from it.