The Impact On Team Performance Of Social Capital And Knowledge Absorptive Capacity

As an important carrier of scientific research work, scientific research team plays acritical role in the ascension university innovation ability, so its performance becomes thefocus of attention. In practice the universities have issued a series of measures tovigorously push forward the construction of scientific research teams, but little effect hasbeen produced so far. In theory, the performance of scientific research team as the researchobject has been well documented. However, there are two flaws in previous studies: eitherignoring the effects of the knowledge process capability of scientific research team; oromitting the social context of scientific research team. In this study, we have established aconceptual model to elaborate the impact of social capital and knowledge absorptivecapacity on the team performance. This model is guided by social capital theory andknowledge absorptive capacity theory, and led by a main clue, i.e., the team social context-knowledge absorptive capacity from the perspective of process-team performance. Inreference to the foundation of the predecessor studies, we analyzed both internal andexternal social capital using scientific research team as a team sample. We defined fourcore variables, that is, internal team social capital, external team social capital, knowledgeabsorptive capacity and team performance. Based on our review of the previous researchresults, we put forward two hypotheses: one is the variable structure hypothesis; another isthe variable relationship hypothesis. Then we developed four core variable scales,respectively. To guarantee the scale of construct validity, and to strive to draw the scalebetter factor structure, we did the exploratory factor analysis of the four scales using datasets got from a pretest. To determine total scale and each component scale reliability andvalidity, we did reliability test. Then we conducted confirmatory factor analysis includingthe first-order confirmatory factor analysis and high order confirmatory factor analysis. Weexplored whether the structure model of the scale factor matched the collected data, andwhether the observation variable consistent can be used as the constructs measurementvariables. Further, we verified the three dimensional structures of internal team socialcapital (the structure dimension, the relationship dimension, the cognitive dimension), the unidimensional structure of external team social capital, the four dimensions of knowledgeabsorptive capacity (knowledge acquisition capacity, knowledge digestion capacity,knowledge transformation capacity and knowledge utilization capacity), and theunidimensional structure of team performance. Last, we verified the variable interactionusing data sets got from the formal investigation. We tested the hypotheses relationshipusing structural equation method of path analysis and the mediate role of test analysis.Theinnovation points of this research include:(1) on a structural equation model, this studyanalyzed the impact of internal and external team social capital and each dimensions onknowledge absorptive capacity and each dimensions, found that the impact of the cognitivedimensions of internal team social capital on knowledge absorptive capacity was notsignificant.(2) analyzed the impact of knowledge absorptive capacity and its dimensionson team performance,found that the impact of knowledge digestion capacity on teamperformance was maximum.(3) in the team level, validated the completely mediate role ofinternal and external team social capital, respectively, between the knowledge absorptivecapacity and team performance.(4) found the low negative correlation between the internaland external team social capital.