The Influence Of Motivations,Behaviors Of University-Industry Collaboration On Academic Performance

The mission of the university to serve the economy and society has made the boundary between the university and the industry become increasingly blurred.As a supplier,the university provides complementary innovation resources for the demand side,enterprises.The university-industry collaboration has become an important means for the development of technological capabilities and industrial transformation and upgrading of enterprises.Good university-industry collaboration should promote the innovation capability and develop independent innovation of enterprises.It also contributes to the achievement of universities' organizational goals.However,researchers in Chinese universities,especially in the field of engineering,has led to the excessive pursuit of applied research,which has led to the shift of the focus of university-industry collaboration to solve practical problems encountered by enterprises.Because the goal of this university-industry collaboration is enterprise-oriented,this makes it more complicated to the impact of university-industry collaboration on the realization of universities' goals and academic performance.The focus of past researches had paid great attention to the impact of university-industry collaboration on corporate performance or cooperation performance.There is a lack of discussion on the impact of university-industry collaboration on the university,especially the academic performance at the individual level,as well as in-depth empirical research.In order to promote the effective integration of enterprises' innovation resources by universities' academics,and to achieve academic performance while achieving the goal of university-industry collaboration,this paper focused on the micro-individual level,academics from university scientific research teams as research object.The literature research method,the exploratory multi-case study,the questionnaire survey and the empirical research method were used.Focusing on the logic of why to participate,how to do it and what results are they in university-industry collaboration,this paper constructed a conceptual theory framework,that is ‘collaborative motivation is the starting point,resource input is the intermediary,partner matching is the moderator,and academic performance is the goal'.The conceptual theory framework clearly replied to the question ‘How do the academics of the universities' research team based on the heterogeneous motivations choose the collaborative behaviors and ultimately lead to maximize academic performance'.This core issue is further broken down into three sub-questions:(1)Why do academics of the university's scientific research teams choose to collaborative with companies and what is academic performance with heterogeneous motivations?(2)How do academics of research team achieve academic performance improvement through individual collaborative behavior?(3)In the organizational context,how can academics of research team achieve the integration of industry to promote academic performance? Focusing on the three sub-questions,360 academics of scientific research teams in the engineering fields of 7 regions in East China,South China,North China and others were taken as the survey samples.Through empirical analysis,most research hypotheses were support.The main research findings are as follows:Firstly,based on the self-determination theory,the motivations of university-industry collaboration among academics of scientific research teams are divided into three categories: funding motivation,learning motivation and mission motivation.The university-industry collaboration driven by different motives have different effect on academic performance.The funding motivation has a negative impact on the academic performance.The learning motivation has a positive impact on the academic performance.The mission motivation has a positive impact on the academic performance without support by the survey data.Secondly,from the perspective of behavioral process,the collaborative behaviors are divided into two categories: the resource input behavior under the individual's own dimension and the partner matching behavior under the interaction dimension between the individual and the environment.In order to better understand the partner matching behavior,partner matching can be divided into complementary partner matching and consistent partner matching based on the person-organization matching theory.There are differences in the impact of academic performance under different dimensions of collaborative behaviors.The impact of resource input behavior on academic performance has an inverted U-shaped relationship based on the understanding of the weak tie and strong tie of social network theory.The complementary partner matching has a positive impact on academic performance,while the positive effect of the consistency partner matching on the academic performance was not supported by the survey data.Thirdly,the concept theory framework of ‘collaborative motivation is the starting point,resource input is the intermediary,partner matching is the moderator,and academic performance is the goal' is established,which opens up the ‘black box' that university-industry collaboration influences the academic performance.In the process of university-industry collaboration,moderate resource input behavior is the basis for ensuring the improvement of academic performance.In the pre-collaboration phase,consistent partner matching and complementary partner matching have different moderate effects on the relationship between heterogeneous motivations and resources input of university-industry collaboration.In the post-collaboration phase,the higher the complementary partner matching,the higher the academic performance will be.The theoretical contribution of this research lies in: firstly,with the collaborative motivations as a breakthrough,it extends and enriches the research on the theory of university-industry collaboration at the individual level,and provides a micro-foundation.Secondly,collaborative behaviors' characteristics with the individual and the interaction between individual and environment are comprehensive considered.It reveals the mechanism of the influence of different collaborative behaviors on academic performance,and more clearly shows the process of university-industry collaborative behaviors and their impact on academic performance.Finally,the classic framework ‘motivation-behavior-performance' is applied in the field of university-industry collaboration innovation in universities.It analyzes the path of heterogeneous collaborative motivation of universities' academics to feed back the academic research through university-industry collaboration,and provides a new research perspective to explain the influence of university-industry collaboration on academic performance of universities' academics.In summary,this study provides theoretical and practical guidance for Chinese universities' academics to participate in university-industry collaboration and the incentive management of university scientific research teams.