Social Capital Impact On Employee Creativity Process Model

As the cornerstone of a country's core competence, independent innovation is playing a more and more important role.On the National Conference on Science and Technology of 2006, our government has lisfted the independent innovation to unprecedented height and the enterprises undoubtedly became the main body of the national independent innovation system. However, the enterprises' lacking of the independent innovation ability has become the weakness of the whole national independent innovation system. The main intrinsic reasons which restrain the independent innovation of our country's enterprises are as followings: For one thing, the incentive mechanism of independent innovation is not perfect. For another thing, our country's enterprises lack independent innovation personnel. Finally, the sense of independent innovation is quite unsubstantial. So, we could conclude that the lack of independent innovation personnel is the key reason. And creativity, as the basement of innovation, has become one competence which is very important and been paid attention to and pursued.On the basis of such a background, this study started from the individual level taking the department as a network, and discussed the process through which the social capital the employees among such network owns influences the creativity these employees obtain. Firstly, the study reviewed the relevant literature of social capital, knowledge share and creativity and concluded the relationship between these three variables. Secondly, on the basis of relative empirical studies, the study chose social capital which has three dimensions as independent variable, then the study took knowledge share as the mediator to study the influence of social capital on creativity. Finally, through the statistic analysis of 207 respondents from professional and technical personnel by the software SPSS 11.5 and AMOS 4.0, the construct and hypotheses of this study had been testified, and the following are the conclusions:(1) The social capital has great influence on creativity. Each dimension of the social capital has influence on creativity, and the relational dimension (trust) has the greatest influence.(2) Knowledge share will influence creativity greatly.(3) Konwledge share works as a mediator between the relationship of social capital and creativity. And social relationship and shared vision are totally mediated, while trust is partially mediated.(4) The mechanisms through which the three dimensions of social capital influence creativity are not the same.(5) Tacit knowledge moderates the relationship between trust and knowledge sharing in such a way that for knowledge higher on tacitness, social capital has a stronger, positive relationship with knowledge share than for knowledge lower on tacitness. (6) Three dimensions of social capital will interact each other.