Research On The Mechanism Of Network Orientation And New Venture Performance

New Ventures have made great contributions to promoting national economic development and maintaining social stability.However,not all new ventures have capabilities to persistently discover and exploit new opportunities and create economic wealth.Due to the liability of newness and smallness,most new ventures fail to start and maintain their businesses.Therefore,how to break this dilemma and explore the source of new venture performance has become a key issue in academic and business circles.According to social capital theory,social network plays a key role in the process of resources integration and innovative opportunities exploitation,new ventures that tend to take advantage of social network are more likely to obtain resources and identify potential valuable opportunities.In this respect,network orientation constructs a set of value system that guiding firms to utilize the network to exploit opportunities and integrate resources,which is conducive to gaining competitive advantage and improving firm performance.However,there are few researches on the mechanism of network orientation and new venture performance.For this reason,in order to open the black box between network orientation and new venture performance,it is urgent to break through the direct relationship between network orientation and new venture performance,and introduce multiple variables,including contingent variables and mediating variables,to explore the relationship between them.The utilization,updation and reconstruction of network resources guarantee the development of competitive advantages,are crucial to the survival and growth of new ventures.In order to adapt to the high uncertainty of the external environment,on the one hand,new ventures must strengthen relationship learning with external network members,and use relationship learning to improve the use of network resources;On the other hand,new ventures must actively cope with the change of external network relations,and use network responsiveness to update and reconstruct resources base.New ventures that emphasize network orientation did well in the above-mentioned two aspects,and interorganizational trust promotes the exchange of network resource among network members,plays a key role in strengthening the relationship between network orientation,relationship learning,network responsiveness,and firm performance.Therefore,based on the situation of China’s transition economy,this study tried to explore the mechanism of network orientation on relationship learning,network responsiveness and firm performance,and deeply explore the role of interorganizational trust on the relationship between above variables.Specifically,this study focuses on the following four aspects: firstly,whether and how network orientation affects new venture performance;secondly,what role does relationship learning play in the process of network orientation affecting firm performance;thirdly,what role does network responsiveness play in the process of network orientation affecting firm performance,and what is the association between network responsiveness and relationship learning,how does this association affect the transformation of network orientation to firm performance;fourthly,how does interorganizational trust(competence trust and benevolence trust)influences the mediating role of relationship learning and network responsiveness.In order to further explore the above issues,this study constructed a theoretical model and developed hypothesis based on social network theory,resource management theory,learning theory and strategy management theory.In the research design,this study chose survey to obtain data of key variables.Through a time-lagged two-wave survey of new ventures within 8 years in the northeast and south of China,350 valid samples were obtained in this study.In terms of data analysis,after testing of non-response bias,common method deviation,reliability and validity of the overall questionnaire,this study employed a conditional process analysis program,PROCESS,developed by Hayes to test all hypotheses,and obtained the following conclusions:(1)network orientation is positively related to new venture performance;(2)relationship learning and network responsiveness play a dual mediating role in the relationship between network orientation and new venture performance;(3)relationship learning and network responsiveness play a serial mediating role in the relationship between network orientation and new venture performance;(4)competence trust positively strengthens the mediating role of relationship learning and network responsiveness;(5)benevolence trust has no significant regulating effect on the mediating role of relationship learning and network responsiveness.This study aims to explore the mechanism of network orientation on new venture performance in the context of China’s transition economy.The theoretical contributions and innovations of this study are as follow:First,this study revealed the dual mediating role of relationship learning and network responsiveness between network range and firm performance.Existing research focuses too much on the influence of the management of resources that firms can fully control on the competitive advantage.However,the resources that new venture can control or fully own are relatively scarce,so it is limited to only manage this part of resources to build competitive advantages.In order to meet the growing development needs and achieve continuous improvement of firm performance,new ventures need to effectively orchestrate resources owned or controlled by other actors(i.e network resources).But few scholars explore the mechanism of network orientation on firm performance from the perspective of network resource orchestration.Based on social network theory and resource orchestration theory,this study integrates network orientation,relationship learning,network responsiveness,and new venture performance together,and explore the dual mediating role of relationship learning and network responsiveness from the perspective of network resource leveraging,updating and restructuring.By doing this,this study not only makes up for the shortcomings of the previous research that focused too much on the management of internal resource and enrich resources orchestration theory,but also helps to open the “black box” between network orientation and new venture performance,and further extends the literature related to network orientation and firm performance.Second,this study revealed the serial mediating role of relational learning and network responsiveness.Although previous studies have identified the role of different resource management processes such as resource acquisition and resource integration in promoting firm performance,few studies have explored the association between different resource management processes and how such association impact the transformation of network orientation to firm performance.In fact,existing entrepreneurial management practices have shown that the sequential differences in the resource management process will affect the construction of competitive advantages and the improvement of firm performance.Therefore,to illustrate the complex mediation mechanism between the focal link,this study employed social network theory and resource management theory to explain the positive relationship between relationship learning and network responsiveness and their serial mediating role in the relationship between network orientation and firm performance.This conclusion,on the one hand,is helpful to further expand the application of resource management theory in the new venture context,and provides insights for the study of dynamic resource management.On the other hand,this study makes up for the defect of previous research that pays too much attention to the multiple mediating role of different resource management processes and ignores their serial mediating mechanism,helps to further reveal the complex mediating mechanism of network orientation to firm performance.Third,this paper revealed the influence of interorganizational trust on the mediating role of relationship learning and network responsiveness.Extant researches mainly focused on the moderating role of institutional environment and competitive intensity in the mechanism of network orientation and firm performance,few studies employed interorganizational trust to examine its moderating role on the boundary condition of network orientation and firm performance relationship.From the perspective of network governance,this study introduced competence trust and benevolence trust and analyzed their moderating role on the mediation effects of relationship learning and network responsiveness.The empirical results show that competence trust positively strengthens the mediating effect of relationship learning and network responsiveness,while benevolence trust does not.This research conclusion is conducive to further clarifying the effect boundaries of relationship learning and network responsiveness,and inspires scholars to further explore different influence of competence trust and benevolence trust on the complex mediating mechanism between network orientation and firm performance.