A Study On The Relationship Among Social Capital, Multi-Team Learning And Innovation Performance

In the current era of knowledge economy, innovation has become an inexhaustible source for enterprise to survival and development. Especially for high-tech enterprises, innovation is an important way for them to maintain their core competitiveness, and sustainably development. However, in the context of economic globalization, enterprises must constantly improve their innovation ability to defend the increasingly competitive, and to satisfy the increasingly diversified customer needs. In stark contrast, the innovation efficiency in China's high-tech enterprises is becoming lower and lower. Therefore, how to change organizational innovation model to enhance innovation performance has become a burning question to be solved.As an important factor in influencing innovation performance, many scholars have analyzed the relationship between social capital and innovation performance. But their results are different from each other. In this article, we will choose R & D team in high-tech enterprises in Zhejiang Province as the research object. And we will join the multi-team learning as a mediator to analysis the relationship between social capital and innovation performance from a new organization theory perspective—that is multi-team system theory. Based on the analysis on plenty of former theories about social capital, multi-team learning and research on current condition within high-tech enterprises, we identifies structure, cognitive, and relational dimensions for social capital, and defined multi-team learning process as a construct characterized by three dimensions based on its component, which includes knowledge acquisition, knowledge sharing and knowledge integration.In this paper, empirical method is used to test the proposed theoretical model and hypotheses. The results show that:In multi-team system, structure capital had significant effect on knowledge sharing, but no significant effect on knowledge acquisition and knowledge integration. Relational capital and cognitive capital had significant effect on the three dimensions of multi-team learning. Three dimensions of multi-team learning had significant effect on innovation performance, when compared, knowledge integration affected innovation performance most. Three dimensions of social capital had significant effect on innovation performance, when compared, relationship capital affect innovation performance most. For the mediator role of multi-team learning, we found:multi-team learning indeed played a mediator role between social capital and innovation performance, but only played a partial mediator role. Meanwhile, three dimensions of multi-team learning all played a mediator role between social capital and innovation performance in some sense. Then we suppose that, in enterprise's multi-team system, they can improved innovation performance not only by the accumulation of social capital and thus enhance the multi-team learning, but also by accumulate social capital directly.At last, based on the conclusions of this study, we put forward some proposals for high-tech enterprises'R & D team on how to improve their innovation performance by using their social capital to enhance multi-team learning. Finally, the directions for future research are discussed.