Social Capital, Absorptive Capacity For Knowledge Acquisition And Innovation Performance

The knowledge-based view of the firm holds that knowledge is the source of an organization's sustainable competitive advantage. In order to increase the firm's innovation performance and keep long-termed advantage, the firm must develop knowledge by itself or acquire knowledge from outside of the organization continuously. Just as Leonard-Barton (1995) argued, only a few firms can develop the required knowledge completely by itself. Most firms have to acquire knowledge from outside. Therefore, it's quite important for firms to acquire knowledge from outside effectively in order to succeed. Based on the review of the relevant literature, this paper focuses on the relationship of knowledge acquisition and organizational innovation performance from the perspective of social capital and the firm's knowledge absorptive capacity among the factors influencing knowledge acquisition and innovation.Among the firms' knowledge sources, customer is an important one. The important role of customers in the firm's innovation process, the different results of the social capital in the firm's knowledge acquisition and innovation process, the important role of knowledge absorptive capacity for the knowledge acquisition and innovation, their influence on the knowledge exchange between firms and customers, the difference of the research results in Chinese culture background and western culture background as well as the reasons are the purposes for the author to conduct further research from the theoretical and empirical perspectives.On the basis of the relatively complete and detailed review of the extant literature, the social capital is divided into three dimensions depending on the research contingency of the manufacturing firm and customers. This paper proposes a theoretical model suitable to analyze the relationship of the firm and customer as well as its influence on knowledge acquisition and innovation performance, which consists of independent variables(the dimensions of social capital), mediating variable(the knowledge acquisition in the social process of firm and customer), moderating variable(the firm's absorptive capacity), dependent variable(the firm's product innovation performance) and control variables(the firm's feature, product difference, scale and social period). In this paper, the social capital is divided into three dimensions, which are the relationship quality, social interaction and cognition between the firm and the customer. The relationship quality consists of trust, satisfaction and commitment; social interaction consists of interaction strength and interaction quality; the cognition dimension consists of organizational distance, shared vision and conflict degree.The empirical analysis of this paper is divided into two stages. The first stage is EFA (exploratory factor analysis), which purpose is to measure the validity and credibility of all variables in the original questionnaire and form the final questionnaire. The second stage is CFA (confirmatory factor analysis), which aims to test the proposed theoretical model and the hypotheses by means of SEM(structural equation model). The main research results are shown below after the empirical analysis of the 318 valid samples:1. The theoretical model that social capital influences the firm's innovation performance through the mediating role of knowledge acquisition is built and tested. Firstly, the mediating role of the knowledge acquisition is tested through correlation and partial correlation analysis. Secondly, the conceptual model is analyzed and compared by SEM and the hypotheses proposed are tested. The mechanism that social capital influences knowledge acquisition and innovation is discussed and some important conclusions are drawn. The analytical results show, the trust between the firm and customer has significant and positive effect on the knowledge acquisition (the standardized regression weight is 0.130, P<0.05). The relationship satisfaction between the firm and customer has significant and positive effect on the knowledge acquisition (the standardized regression weight is 0.200, P<0.01). The relationship commitment between the firm and customer has no significant and positive effect on the knowledge acquisition performance. The social interaction strength and quality between the firm and customer have significant and positive effect on the knowledge acquisition (the standardized regression weight is 0.302 and 0.163, P<0.01). The organizational distance between the firm and customer has significantly negative effect on the knowledge acquisition (the standardized regression weight is -0.255, P<0.01). The shared vision between the firm and customer has no significant and positive effect on the knowledge acquisition performance. The conflict degree between the firm and customer has significantly negative effect on the knowledge acquisition (the standardized regression weight is -0.129, P<0.05). The knowledge acquisition has significant and positive effect on the knowledge acquisition (the standardized regression weight is 0.272, P<0.01).2. The relationship of the three second-order factor of social capital and eight first-order factors is tested through the second-order CFA of SEM. The research result shows high validity and credibility. The hypotheses about the relationship between three dimensions of social capital and knowledge acquisition are tested by SEM. The relationship quality, the social interaction and the cognition between the firm and customer have significant and positive effect on the knowledge acquisition (the standardized regression weight is 0.257, 0.315 and 0.218 respectively, P<0.05).3. The moderating role of the firm's absorptive capacity and its influence on the relationship between dimensions of social capital, knowledge acquisition and innovation performance is tested by means of dividing the sample into two sub-groups. According to the five indicators of the absorptive capacity, the sample is divided into two groups by the K-means cluster in the SPSS13.0 software. The high absorptive capacity group has 175 valid samples. The low absorptive capacity group has 143 valid samples. The path coefficients of high-low absorptive capacity groups are compared and the relevant hypotheses are tested through multi-group analysis in SEM. The research results are shown below:(1) the firm's absorptive capacity moderates the relationship between relationship quality and knowledge acquisition performance. The relationship between trust and knowledge acquisition is not significant in the low-capacity group but significant in the high-capacity group, which indicates the firm's absorptive capacity's significant moderating effect on the relationship between trust and knowledge acquisition. The firm's absorptive capacity has significant moderating effect on the relationship between satisfaction and knowledge acquisition (the result of the multi-group analysisshows the difference of the x~2 value is 8.320, P=0.004).(2) the firm's absorptive capacity moderates the relationship between social interaction and knowledge acquisition. The firm's absorptive capacity has no significant moderating effect on the relationship between interaction frequency and knowledge acquisition performance (the result of the multi-group analysis shows thedifference of the x~2 value is 0.264, P=0.608). The relationship between interactionquality and knowledge acquisition performance is not significant in the low-capacity group but significant in the high-capacity group, which indicates the firm's absorptive capacity has significant moderating effect on the relationship between interaction quality and knowledge acquisition.(3) the firm's absorptive capacity moderates the relationship between cognition and knowledge acquisition performance. The firm's absorptive capacity has significant moderating effect on the relationship between organizational distance and knowledge acquisition (the result of the multi-group analysis shows the difference of the x~2 value is 5.547, P=0.032). The firm's absorptive capacity has partiallysignificant moderating effect on the relationship between conflict degree and knowledge acquisition performance (the result of the multi-group analysis shows thedifference of the x~2 value is 3.058, P=0.056), which indicates that the conflict is nothelpful to the knowledge acquisition in both cases.(4) the firm's absorptive capacity moderates the relationship between knowledge acquisition performance and innovation performance. The relationship between knowledge acquisition performance and innovation performance is not significant in the low-capacity group (the standardized regression weight is 0.105, t-value=1.053). The knowledge acquisition has significant and positive effect on innovation performance (the standardized regression weight is 0.279, P<0.05) in the high-capacity group, which indicates the firm's absorptive capacity has significant moderating effect on the relationship between knowledge acquisition and innovation performance.4. Four control variables have no significant effect on the mediating variable and dependent variable from the analysis result. One possible reason is this research has excluded the extreme cases when surveying. So the analysis result is only suitable to the sample firms.Finally, this paper summarizes the possible theoretical contributions and significances of the research for the practice field, the research limitations and advice for future research.Many contents of this research are explorative researches in the background of Chinese culture considering the specific context of manufacturing firms and their customers, which includes the refinement and empirical tests of the social capital dimensions, as well as the moderating role of absorptive capacity on the relationship between social capital and knowledge acquisition. It's wished that this research will be helpful for the future similar research.