Change-driven Organizational Knowledge Sharing And Its Performance Mechanism In Internet Entrepreneurship: An Organizational Memory Perspective

The dramatic development of information and communication technology not only changed the rules of market competition, but also became the main driving force for organizational change. Like M&A, corporate entrepreneurship and international entrepreneurship, the internet entrepreneurship has demonstrated a typical pattern of organizational change in Chinese enterprises. Base on the literature review, this dissertation took organizational memory theory as the research framework to systematically interpret organizational knowledge sharing in internet entrepreneurship. Three theoretical issues were resolved:(1) what were the construct of the change-driven organizational knowledge sharing in the context of internet entrepreneurship? (2) What were the factors of organizational knowledge sharing, and how the change strategies of internet entrepreneurship drove the formation of organizational knowledge sharing? (3) How did organizational knowledge sharing influence internet entrepreneurship performance? There are five studies were conducted to answer these questions.In study 1, the situational features of organizational knowledge sharing in internet entrepreneurship was confirmed. This study explored the construct of organizational change strategy in internet entrepreneurship by means of multi-case study method. Through the in-depth within-case analysis and the cross-case analysis with four typical internet entrepreneurship organizations, the study found that the organizational change strategy in internet entrepreneurship could be classified into four types including mass collaboration, virtual collaboration, synergistic control and modular production by combining the process reengineering and the boundary spanning.In study 2, the construct of organizational knowledge sharing characteristic in internet entrepreneurship were examined. Using organizational memory theory as an analytical framework, this study employed the focus group method to interview 13 managers from 13 different internet entrepreneurship organizations in characteristics of organizational knowledge sharing, as well as its construct, practices and processes. Content analysis was conducted for coding the interview materials. The results showed that organizational knowledge sharing in internet entrepreneurship was a multi-dimensional construct which included interactive knowledge sharing and integrated knowledge sharing. In study 3 the construct of knowledge sharing was verified by means of empirical method. The original questionnaire was developed by referring both from previous research and the results of focus group interview, and a large scale samples was collected to verify the reliability and validity of the construct. On the stage of scale refinement, exploratory factor analysis was conducted in a sample of 79 firms. The final scale included 18 items with five dimensions. On the stage of scale verification, another independent sample of 121 firms was employed to conduct a confirmatory factor analysis. The results showed that the organizational knowledge sharing in internet entrepreneurship is based on a second-order five-factor model. The first-order factors included expertise recognition, interactive retrieval, communicative coordination, unlearning and transformative storage. And the second-order factors were interactive knowledge sharing and integrated knowledge sharing.In study 4, the antecedents of organizational knowledge sharing in internet entrepreneurship was examined with two sub-studies. This study systematically examined the antecedents of organizational knowledge sharing using a sample of 173 firms. This study had two parts. First, this study investigated the effects of organizational change strategy on knowledge sharing by SEM. The results showed that the mass collaboration and virtual collaboration significantly influenced the interactive knowledge sharing, and the synergistic control positively influenced the integrated knowledge sharing. Second, the task characteristics were introduced into the model. The results showed that the interaction between change strategy and task characteristic had significant effects on organizational knowledge sharing. The effects of change strategy and task characteristic on organizational knowledge sharing varied with different change stages.In study 5, the performance mechanism of organizational knowledge sharing was explained with two sub-studies. Using the laboratory experiment method, sub-study 1 used a 2×2 between-subject design to examine the interactive mechanism with knowledge sharing characteristics. The results from a sample of 60 groups showed that the interaction effect of interactive and integrated knowledge sharing was significant, and the relationship between organizational knowledge sharing and performance were exhibited a priming effect or reference effect according to the different extent of knowledge sharing. A further investigation of knowledge transfer and pooling process was conducted to express the priming and reference effect. Based on the organizational dynamic capability theory, the sub-study 2 employed a simulated experiment to express the performance mechanism of organizational knowledge sharing. This study used a mixed design to examine the effects of knowledge sharing on internet entrepreneurship performance of different organizational change stages. The results from a sample of 207 subjects showed that knowledge combinative capability mediated the relationship between organizational knowledge sharing and internet entrepreneurship performance. Further more, the effects of organizational knowledge sharing showed different paths on the performance of internet entrepreneurship at stages.Finally, the main research findings of this dissertation were systematically summarized. The theoretical progresses and practical implications were discussed in relation to limitations and directions for future research.