| In the knowledge economy times, the increase of the global economy is dependent on the fast innovation of advanced technology. Fast innovation and advanced technology is the symbol of a competitive country. As the principal participant of the economy system, enterprises are subject to a fast-changing environment and keen competition. Therefore, in order to gain the competitive advantage, it is critical for enterprises to seek one kind way of working which can spur them on to more innovations. It is especially so for the research department in the high-tech enterprises. The mission of the research department is to develop new products or services constantly and it is a most creative process, which needs quite a lot of interdisciplinary cooperation of the knowledge-employees from different departments and with different skills. Thus, it becomes a very meaningful research to find a new management and operation model, which can make the creative activities more effective and keep on with the fast-changing environment constantly.Thus, the way of research in a team becomes the most popular way of working. This way of working agrees with the nature of the research activity, which can improve the creative activities and meets with the need of cooperation. Always a research team needs the participation of knowledge-employees with various skills, and also there is always frequently communication among members of an excellent research team. Everyone is open to share their key knowledge with others. They have close relations and deep communication. Meanwhile, the team leader plays an important role in the research process. They can coordinate the whole team, provide them the opportunity to communicate with each other, which can strengthen the network structure, promote knowledge sharing and form the positive environment. However, the former researchers haven't paid much attention to this point and they focused more on authorization, leadership style, individual creativity and so on. Though there is already some research on transformational leadership and innovation performance, there is little research on the relationship between network structure and innovation performance. The network structure is formed by longtime communication among team members. It includes the density of network, centricity, heterogenicity, strength of social ties and so on. We carry out the research from the social network structure perspective rather than the social capital perspective and we divide it into two dimensionalities:the network density and the interact strength.Therefore, in order to have an penetrating study of the creativity process in the R&D process and to make clear the major factors that affect creativity, this research takes the network structure as the research initial point, which is in the social network theory view and is based on the essence of the traditional team management theory, and then we analyze thoroughly the creativity process from leadership and team network. We will describe the affecting process in detail, in which team environment is the mediate variable. We have researched on more than seventy R&D teams in high-technology enterprises in China. Through deep analysis, we find that the team network structure as well as the transformational leadership does great good to the innovation performance. Besides, the knowledge-sharing environment is the mediate variable during the process. What's more, the transformational leadership is helpful to strengthen the network structure of the team, which then can provide more opportunity for knowledge sharing and communication. All these conclusions are tested and verified through the investigation. The results the enterprise's leaders to pay more attention to the R&D team's network structure except for the leadership style and it is important for the team members to communicate actively with both the fellow workers and the outsiders in order to build effective social network. |
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