A Study On The Impact Of Enterprise R&D Teams' Informal Network Structure On The Performance Of Product Innovation

With the development of economic globalization, more and more firms adopt the team-based structure to product innovation, and gain prominent effects. From the perspective of sociology, innovation ideas often come into being by people's informal interactions, and regard the human relationship as conduits of resources. Then in the R&D teams of firms, how the informal networks which come into being through the informal interaction of R&D employees affect the performance of product innovation? That is to say, how does the out- and in- R&D teams'informal network centrality affect product innovation? How to explain it through the perspective of network?Surrounding this question, the questionnaire was used for collecting relevant data. Then using several research methods to analyze the data, such as multiple regression analysis, social network analysis and case study. The research findings are: The density of the R&D team's internal consult networks has an inversely U-shaped relationship to the performance of product innovation. This means R&D teams should keep a moderate level of internal communication on consultant, too frequently or less consult communication will detrimental to the performance of product innovation. The density (between 0.3 and 0.667) of the R&D team's internal emotional networks has an positive relationship to the performance of product innovation. This means R&D employees promote emotional communication will enhance the performance of product innovation.On the research of R&D teams'centrality of outward consultant networks, the results are in-centrality of R&D team has a negative relationship to the performance of product innovation, out-degree centrality of R&D team has a positive relationship to the performance of product innovation. This illustrate that team ask for advice to other teams will gain more resources, such as information, knowledge, etc., and then enhance the performance of product innovation; higher in-centrality team often busy in coping with other teams'questions and requirement, so will decrease the performance of product innovation.At the same time, through the empirical test of the relevance of emotional and consultant networks, the prominent positive correlation have been found( Base the p<0.01 level), the correlation coefficient is 0.261.Using social network analysis approach to describe and discover features of enterprise R&D teams'relationship network, discussing in and out informal networks of enterprise R&D teams's features on the performance of product innovation, this is a clearly distinction to the research from the attributes of R&D teams and their members, this is the a characteristic of research perspective.Due to probing in the whole network of R&D department, which required to investigate all the nodes in the network boundary. That is to say, every R&D employees are willing to fill in the questionnaire, otherwise cannot draw the map of whole network. Then must adopt census not random sample survey method, which is distinct to the collecting variable data method of common causal analysis.In the process of dealing data, integrated social network package UCINET 6.0 for Windows and statistical package SPSS 13.0. Linking network analysis and multiple regression analysis, using qualitative analysis, map and list data as supplement to the quantative analysis, this is the characteristic of research method. In the future, some questions are worth researching: In the research of centrality, previous theory consider individuals in the central position could acquire amount of resources, such as information and knowledge. But what worth research more is how to enhance individuals'ability of handling information and knowledge so as to enhance the performance of teams. What is the contribution of higher in-degree centrality individuals? What is the difference between Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB), how does the enterprise to reward such individuals, this require further research.What's more, in the network research often find some isolate individuals, that is to say, these individuals have no relationship with others. The question lies on how to exert their ability to enhance the performance of the whole enterprise, it also worth concentrate on in the future research.At last, network dynamics need further researching. Because in reality, the network often changing, because human relations are not invariable, good friends maybe fall out and become enemies among the friends; at the same time, perceiving their disadvantage positions, the isolate individuals may try to connect to others, then the structure of network is changing. So the network dynamics is another research problem in the future.