The Effect Of Social Capital On The Performance Of Consulting Projects

How to improve the project performance is an important research topic in the area of construction project management. With the increasing degree of project complexity and specialization, the project owners or other customers are hard to rely on their own strength to complete the project management. In this case, the importance of the engineering consulting increasingly prominent. Engineering consulting project performance is not only related to the enterprise’s own development, but to the whole construction project success. At the same time, social capital theory begin to flourish. Its strong explanatory power has been proofed a lot in the field of management science. Based on this, this article attempts to using social capital theory to research and analyze the performance of engineering consulting project.The research based on social capital theory, from the engineering consulting project perspective, combining the related research results of knowledge transfer, discusses the mechanism and path of social capital to project performance. The main research contents are as follows:First, based on the previous research about social capital literature, the thesis extracts three dimensions of project social capital and the specific research items. The structure dimension includes network centrality, network density, interaction strength, while the relationship dimension includes trust and duty and expectation, and cognitive dimension includes common language.Second, from the group point of view, based on the engineering consulting industry, the thesis establishes the social capital system of organization level, project level and individual level, and constructs the whole theoretical framework among project social capital, knowledge transfer and the performance of project.Third, on the basis of theoretical analysis, the thesis constructs the theory model, puts forward the research hypothesis, develops the scale based on the previous maturity scale, and obtains the final research scale through the small sample test, of which reliability analysis and exploratory analysis on the scale’s reliability and validity are verified.Fourth, the thesis collects the required data by the large-scale survey of the revised scale. After the confirmatory analysis, the hypotheses are tested respectively based on the first-order and second-order variables’structural equation model.Fifth, it summarizes the research conclusion, points out the innovation and shortage, and puts forward the direction for further research.Based on the above contents, the main conclusion includes:First, the effects of different dimensions of social capital on knowledge transfer are different.According to the Nahapiet and Ghoshal’s (1998),the paper divides social capital to structure dimension, relation dimension and cognitive dimension, and defines and refines the evaluation indexes of each dimension with reference to previous research. This paper constructs the first-order variable structural equation based on the three levels’different dimensions, knowledge transfer and the task performance and innovation performance of project. Through empirical test, it obtains that the effects of different dimensions of social capital on knowledge transfer are different. Specific analysis is as follows:From the organizational level, the effects of structure dimension and relationship dimension on knowledge transfer are significantly positive, but the cognitive dimension is not. This mean, for project, the effect of structure dimension and relational dimension is more apparent, and the importance of cognitive dimensions is insufficient. This is consistent with our experience, often organitional social contact and relationship to the project are more important to obtain knowledge, but whether knowledge suppliers with a common language have little effect, because the ultimate recipient and direct user of knowledge are the project manager and the project members.From project level, structure dimension, relationship dimension and cognitive dimensional all have positive effect on knowledge transfer. This mean project level social capital has more important role to knowledge transfer. The the path coefficient of relationship dimension of0.2423, larger than that of the structure dimension0.2224and cognitive dimension0.1238, indicating that for the project level social capital, relation dimension is more prominent, but cognitive dimension is weaker than relationship and structure dimension.From personal perspective, all the three dimensions are significantly positive, indicating that individual level of social capital on knowledge transfer also has a more important role. Different from the first two levels, the cognitive dimensions of individual social capital plays an very important role, which path coefficient is0.2961, larger than that of the structure dimension0.1707and relational dimension0.1942. The means that common language between project members and knowledge transfer remarkably affect the knowledge transfer between projects, this is because the ultimate receiver and the user of knowledge are the members of the project.Overall, the effect of the structure dimension and relationship dimension of organizational level and project level of social capital on knowledge transfer between projects are more obvious, while the cognitive dimension of individual level is more obvious. The sequences are as follows:the cognitive dimension of individual level, structure dimension of organizational level, relationship dimension of project level, structure dimension of project level, relationship dimension of individual level, structure dimension of individual level, cognitive dimension of project level.Second, the effect of different levels of social capital on knowledge transfer are different.Contrary to previous research which only from the single level perspective, the thesis proposes the project social capital system based on different levels, establishes two-order factor model by taking organizational level social capital, project level social capital and individual level social capital as the two-order variables, and takes the empirical research. The results showed that, all different dimensions of social capital have significant impacts on knowledge transfer, and individual level’s path coefficient is0.3460, more than the project level’s0.2637and organizational level’s0.2395, which shows that for projects knowledge transfer, individual level transfer is more apparent, followed by the project level, and then organizational level. But from our experience, the level higher, the role of social capital should be more obvious. The results of this study with this discrepancy, it because that the result of this study model does not consider the correlation of the three levels, and organizational level and project level may affect knowledge transfer through individual level, which will remain at further research to verify.Third, knowledge transfer has an intermediary role in the relationship between social capital and project performance.This article proves knowledge transfer has an intermediary role in the relationship of social capital and project performance through taking knowledge transfer as a control variable. This shows that social capital does not directly produce effect, but affects the project performance through knowledge transfer, which is consistent with the theory analysis. This paper argues that social capital is a network of social relations to obtain the resource, not the resource itself, while accesses resources through social capital. At the same time, it also proves some scholars’ research which insist that social capital affect performance indirectly once again. For the effect of knowledge transfer, previous scholars have done a lot of research. Social capital can not only make the knowledge receiver a comprehensive understanding of explicit knowledge, aiding to an enhanced reception effect, the tacit knowledge exchanges are becoming more and more important. Social capital can construct a special relationship between knowledge transferor and the knowledge receiver, through which a better effect of transfer and share knowledge (Szulanski,1996). This paper proves the effect of knowledge transfer between projects on the performance of project again. The results show that, the role of knowledge transfer to the project task performance (path coefficient0.6542) is greater than that of innovation performance (path coefficient0.3903). This means, the project knowledge transfer is more obvious for the project to complete the task relative to the project innovation. One reason is the project task oriented characteristics, another reason is maybe there are other conditions to project’s innovation.The factors influencing the performance of the project innovation improvement will be one of the future research directions.The innovation of this paper are mainly the following three points.First, based on the project’s point of view of social capital, the thesis enriches social capital theory on the group level.In the previous study, the theory of social capital had very great progress at the individual level and organizational level, but had less relevant research at the group level, especially the project level. The project, a special group level, with temporary and complexity, is the basic unit of activity in the engineering field, which has important significance for the completion of the construction project and the development of the construction industry. This article carries on theoretical discussion and empirical study based on the project, enriches social capital theory on the group level.Second, the thesis constructs a cross level system of the project social capital, expanding the social capital theory perspective.The previous research of social capital theory, whether from the organization or individual level, or from the group level, all start from a single level, and few people discusses from the cross level perspective of the social capital. Based on this, the article construct an across hierarchy system from the organizational level, project level and individual level, and empirically studies the effects of different levels of social capital on the project performance, expanding the social capital perspective.Third, bring social capital theory into the field of project management, the thesis expands the ideas of project management research.Social capital theory has many applications in management area,but insufficient in the field of project management. The article is based on a project perspective, studies the social capital’s effect on the project performance through the mediating role of knowledge transfer from sociological point of view, which expands the ideas of project management research, and has a certain practical significance to the engineering consulting project management.