Study On The Influence Of Strategic Network On Firm Performance

The significance of strategic network for enterprise performance has been concerned by many scholars in different research fields. But so far, we can’t answer the following questions:how strategic network exert impact on firm performance? what is the influence mechanism and the influence path of strategic network? We think these questions are the most essential problems for strategic network. Only to answer these questions, we can understand network management and network management ability profoundly and comprehensively.In the field of strategic management, scholars still can’t give a clear answer on the mechanism and path of strategic network impacting on firm performance. Firstly, most of scholars study the influence mechanism from the point of the structural embeddedness, excluding the cognitive embeddedment and cultural embeddedness. Secondly, the routing process of strategic network affect enterprise behavior and performance is not clear. While in the field of sociology, especially with the development of the social capital theory, scholars provide the supplementary for above two research aspects. Based on a great amount of literature, the auther found that the two research fields ignored each other, which leading to firm performance can’t be accutately known. The paper is trying to put the two aspects combining through constrcting the model of the influence mechanism and the path of strategic networks affecting firm peroformance in the perspective of social network. At the same time, we argue that the enterprise absorbtion ability also affect performance. For this, the absorption ability is introduced into above model.First of all, this paper definited the key concepts for meeting the need of follow-up studies. Secondly, the foreign and domestic literature research were discussed and evaluated in order to offer the thought foundation for the model. Based on the above two steps, the conceptural model was constructed and the corresponding research hypothesis ware put forward. Thirdly, the final questionnaire was designed through the test of the reliability and validity. Then, a mount of data ware collected through field study based on above questionnaire. Thouthly, the SEM of this paper was construced through using the software of AMOS, and then was made empirical test, the final conclusion are as follows:One, the network embeddedness plays the role of the influence mechanism of strategic network affecting firm performance. As the mechanism of exchangement and operation, the network embeddedness affects firm performance though affecting the abilities of getting all kinds of resources. In this paper, Embeddedness was devided into structural embeddedness, relational embeddedness and cultural embeddedness, by which network organizations affect firm behavior and performance. This paper also studied the relation among the three network embeddedness, and the empirical conclusion is that the structural embeddedness positive correlates with the relational embeddedness and the cultural embeddedness, while the cultural embeddedness positive correlates with the relational embeddedness.Two, strategic networks affect firm performance through influencing the access of network knowledge resources. Obviously, network knowledge resource plays a intermediate role in the process of strategic network affecting firm performance, while networks impact on performance indirectly. The empirical conclusion is that the higher firms embeddednes degree, the more network knowleded resources are accessed. And network knowledge resource positive correlate with firm performance.Three, firm absorptive capacity plays an important role in the process of strategic network affecting network knowledge resource and firm performance. The performance of embeddedness firms is proved by network embeddedness and absorptive capacity. The empirical conclusion is that the potential absorptive capacity positive correlates with network knowledge resources, while the realistic absorptive capacity positive correlates with network knowledge resources and firm performance.