Staff Relations, Communication Studies, Its Role In The Mechanism Of Knowledge Sharing And Knowledge Integration

Knowledge had become the critical factor to economy growth and social development. The nature of firm competition and the sources of competitive advantage have shifted toward knowledge-based resources. The topic of better managing a firm's intellectual assets to achieve competitive advantage has received a great deal of attention in management research. In particular, researchers have argued that the ability to leverage valuable existing knowledge internally is critical to building competitive advantage because of the scarcity of valuable internal knowledge and the difficulty and expense of creating new knowledge. One important way of leveraging existing knowledge is through the sharing and integration of existing firm-specific knowledge among different individuals within the organization. It has been recognized that such intrafirm knowledge sharing and integration is a critical source of competitive advantage, and the key to firm sustainable growth and a driver of firm performance.There are many factors that influence the willingness of employees' knowledge sharing and the capability of employees' knowledge integration. From the guanxi perspective, the purpose of this research is to explore the function mechanism of employees' guanxi on their willingness of knowledge sharing and capability of knowledge integration and give the firm of China more advices of indigenous compatibility.According to the investigation of guanxi, communication, knowledge sharing, knowledge integration and other relative literature reviews, the author confirmed some theoretical issues unresolved: What is the construct of guanxi? How does guanxi influence employees' knowledge sharing and knowledge integration? How does communication influence employees' knowledge sharing and knowledge integration? What kinds of relationship exist between knowledge sharing and knowledge integration?Following the way of "guanxi→communication behavior→knowledge sharing and integration", the author proposed a series of research hypotheses and a theoretical model, and conducted this research with organizational members through questionnaire to resolve the above issues.A. The construct of guanxi was explored.Through the literatures review, the paper defined employees' guanxi as a construct characterized by three dimensions based on its component, which includes obligational guanxi, expressive guanxi and instructive guanxi. Obligational guanxi is based on the traditional ethics, expressive guanxi is based on the real affection, and instructive guanxi is based on the material interests. Empirical study showed that these measure scales had good reliability and validity.At the same time, this research found there are a positive relationship between obligational guanxi and expressive guanxi (r=0.244, p=0.000) , a negative relationship between obligational guanxi and instructive guanxi ( r= -0.189, p=0.000); expressive guanxi and instructive guanxi (r= -0.166, p=0.000) .The same conclusion was also gotten from the influence of guanxi's different dimensions to employees' knowledge sharing and integration. Expressive guanxi as well as obligational guanxi had positive influence upon employees' cooperative communication, knowledge sharing and integration, and negative influence on employees' competitive communication.B. The mechanism of guanxi on employees' willingness of knowledge sharing and capability of knowledge integration was explored.This research took cooperative communication, competitive communication and avoiding communication as the mediators to explore the intrinsic mechanism of guanxi on employees' willingness of knowledge sharing and capability of knowledge integration, and using the SEM (structural equation modeling), the research also compared the influences and effect mechanisms of three kinds of communication behaviors. The outcomes of the test showed that the modified semi-mediation model had best fitness, i.e. Guanxi affected knowledge sharing and knowledge integration through the mediation of cooperative communication, competitive communication and avoiding communication partially. The results also revealed that cooperative communication, competitive communication and avoiding communication were the semi-mediators between guanxi and willingness of knowledge sharing. Cooperative communication was the semi-mediator between obligational guanxi and capability of knowledge integration, the full-mediator between expressive guanxi and capability of knowledge integration, the semi-mediator between instructive guanxi and capability of knowledge integration.C. The influential effect of willingness of knowledge sharing on capability of knowledge integration was tested.Based on literature review and depth interview, this study discussed the effect of willingness of knowledge sharing on capability of knowledge integration, and the empirical research found that willingness of knowledge sharing had significant effect on capability of knowledge integration (β=0.384,p<0.001).D. Other factors that influence cooperative communication, competitive communication, avoiding communication, willingness of knowledge sharing and capability of knowledge integration were identified.Cooperative communication, competitive communication and avoiding communication were the mediator variables; knowledge sharing and integration were the dependent variables in the theoretical model. There are many other factors that influence these variables. The paper took employees' individual variables such as sex, age, educational background, working time in the organization, department, and organizational variables such as the firm property, sector and size et al., as control variables, and analyzed their influence on the mediator variables and the dependent variables. The ANOVA results showed that the employees with senior high school education background had less capability of knowledge integration than other having higher education background; the employees in marketing department had lower scores on cooperative communication than others; compared with common staffs and front-line manager, top manager had higher scores on capability of knowledge integration; the employees whose working time in the organization more than seven years had higher scores on avoiding communication than the other.Through exploring the mechanism of guanxi on willingness of knowledge sharing and capability of knowledge integration, this paper enriched theories of guanxi, communication, knowledge sharing and integration. Finally, the theoretical progresses and practical implications were discussed, as well as the research limitations and future study directions.