The Research On The Effect Of Channel Control Mechanisms Upon Knowledge Sharing In Communication Industry

With the advent of knowledge economy era, global competition is becoming increasingly fierce, and competitive advantage increasingly depends on the inimitable knowledge. However, when competition among individual enterprises changed into competition among marketing networks, enterprise's own knowledge cannot meet the competing demand. Enhancing the cooperation with the upstream and downstream enterprises of channels and achieving knowledge sharing among channel members become new management content and development direction of marketing channels. How to promote knowledge sharing among channel members in order to enhance the competitiveness of the whole channel is becoming a focus for enterprises.Channel control is an important and indispensable part in promoting reasonable operation, enhancing efficiency of the channel and maintaining the channel relationship. Rational use of channel control mechanisms can strengthen relationships among channel members, protect implementation force of the channel strategy, enhance cooperative efficiency of the channel, thus realizing knowledge sharing among channel members and raising the overall competitiveness of channels. The relationship between channel control mechanisms and knowledge transfer has been studied from both theoretical and practical aspects, but as to control mechanisms, most research only involves two mechanisms, contract and relational norms. While on the research of control results it also lacks studies on a higher level of knowledge sharing in depth.In order to explore the channel control mechanisms' impact on knowledge sharing more deeply and comprehensively, three parts of research work are conducted. First of all, based on the thoroughly literature review of channel control theory, knowledge management theory and knowledge sharing theory, we can have an initial understanding of the relationship between control mechanisms and knowledge sharing. Then, the research introduce channel relationships into the study, analyze the relationship among channel control mechanisms, channel relationships and knowledge sharing, propose the research hypothesis and build a research model at last. Finally, this dissertation takes the distributors firms of communication industry as the subjects, with the method of empirical research, the hypothesis and the model proposed are tested. The results show that, three kinds of channel control mechanisms have significant and direct influence on knowledge sharing among channel members, in which power mechanism generates the negative effects, while contract and relational norm generate positive effects. Meanwhile, the three kinds of channel control mechanisms can influence knowledge sharing indirectly through channel relationship. The three kinds of channel control mechanisms have strong effects on economic satisfaction and social satisfaction, in which power mechanism have negative effects while contract and relational norm have positive effects. Economic satisfaction and social satisfaction have positive effects on trust and independence. Trust and independance are the direct antecedents of knowledge sharing among members.