Venture Enterprise Social Network Competence And Entrepreneurial Performance Relationship Research

Due to the liabilities of newness and smallness, entrepreneurial firms usually fail to procure desired resources from formal and ritualized channels like more established corporations. Therefore, social network has become a predominant and important approach to getting access to essential resources (capital, physical resources, human resources, and information resources) for new entrepreneurial firms' survival and early growth.In the process of transition from start-up to early growth, entrepreneurial firms' social network will evolve at the same time. For most of entrepreneurial firms which are at the early stages of development, their networks are characterized by high embededness and cohesiveness. Most of entrepreneurial activities at these periods are concerned with building, maintaining, making use of and managing networks. The execution, qualification, skills, and knowledge exhibited through these activities are defined as network competence.This research delves into Chinese entrepreneurial firms at their start-up and early growth stages of development. The concept of network competence is examined in the context of China's entrepreneurship. Case studies and other empirical studies show that under Chinese context the concept of network competence is also a two folded construct, with task execution and qualifications as two dimensions. Task execution is about initiating, maintaining and terminating social relations and ties within a network. It can be subdivided into relationship-specific task execution and cross-relational task execution. Qualifications are knowledge, skills and capabilities exhibited during task execution. Qualifications are subdivided into specialist qualifications and social qualifications. The two dimensions are interconnected with each other. Qualifications are resources and preconditions for effective task execution, whereas task execution is the precondition for further development of qualifications.In order to measure the relationship between network competence and entrepreneurial performances, related entrepreneurial performances are divided into three dimensions: profitability, potential of employees' growth, and firm's opportunity capture ability. The results of this study show that task execution has significant influence on the performances of profitability and opportunity capture; whereas network qualifications have significant influence on the performance of employees' growth and opportunity capture.