Meta-analytic Research On The Impact Of Corporate Social Capital On Innovation

In today's turbulent market environment.firms are confronted with a myriad of challenges ranging from intense competition from around the globe to ever-changing consumer demands.The possession of traditional resources could no longer guarantee firms a competitive advantage in the market.To outperform their rivals,firms need to rely on continuous organizational learning and innovation.However,along with the development of technology and economy,firms are finding themselves unable to undertake R&D activities on their own as the investment and the risks would be enormous considering the ever-increasing complexities of technologies.Hence,in the past few decades,firms have started to rely on technological and social network for their innovative activities.This has greatly altered people and especially management scholars' perception of innovation.Innovation is then seen as a complex process involving collaborative efforts from multiple actors instead of a simple and linear process from research labs to market.With this shift in the understanding of innovation,many scholars have started to pay attention to the social networks that firms are embedded in and through which firms access valuable information,knowledge and resources.In China,a country whose social culture is characterized by the notion of "guanxi" and where business relations are believed to be highly socially embedded,social networks and social capital,a concept originated from the west and often defined as the potential or actual resources that are available or are attained through a firm's social networks and contacts,have also attracted significant academic attention,especially their interrelationships with organizational innovation.This has led to a drastic increase in the number of research papers,both empirical and theoretical,on the relationship between social capital and organizational innovation.Though these studies have significantly improved our understanding about the relationship between social capital and innovation,there are still certain issues limiting our comprehension of this relationship in this research filed.For one thing,present research is still divided over the role of social capital in organizational innovation.Although many researchers have suggested a positive role by pointing out the benefits of social capital including lowering inter-organizational and intra-organizational transaction costs,promoting the flow of information and knowledge and facilitating communication and cooperation,still a certain number of empirical studies have presented contradictory results,either suggesting a negative role or an insignificant role of social capital in driving organizational innovation.For another,few research has looked into the process through which social capital exerts an influence on organizational innovation.To be specific,a considerable amount of existing research is devoted to the examination of the structural dimension of social capital paying insufficient attention to the relational dimension and cognitive dimension and even less to the interaction between the three dimensions.Yet,the understanding of the interactions between the three dimensions is believed to be critical for comprehending the mechanisms through which social capital works and influences organizational innovation.With an aim to address these issues,this research adopts a meta-analytic technique and reviews previous empirical research,specifically those published between Jan,2000 and Jan,2017,on the relationship between social capital and organizational innovation with enterprises in China as the object of research.Through searching the CNKI,Wanfang Data and VIP journal integration platform,this study has collected 203 relevant studies and has based on its standards selected 42 of them for meta-analysis.By integrating the research results of previous studies,this study has found out that social capital does play a positive role in driving organizational innovation and that there are positive interactions between the three dimensions of social capital while absorptive capacity plays a significant mediating role in the relationship between social capital and innovation.These findings are not only meaningful for researchers as they addressed important research questions but also valuable for managers as they offer managers constructive guidance as to how to improve organizational innovation performance.