Research On The Impact Of Guanxi Embeddedness、Enterprise Absorptive Capacity On Inter-Organizational Knowledge Transfer

In era of the post financial crisis, the environment enterprise facing is moreturbulent and complex. The pace of innovation enterprise conducting is accelerating. Asthe bankruptcy of the United States prestige icon Kodak signaled that: ignore innovation,organization will be washed out by the market; innovation speed too slow, organizationalso will be sifted out by the market. The knowledge-based view of the firm holds thatknowledge is the key source of an organization’s sustainable competitive advantage.Meanwhile, the network-based view of the firm holds that the network firm embedded iscritical platform for transferring relative resources and knowledge. Thus how to build upties in relational network and how to manage and maintain these relationship and how toimprove firms’ absorptive capacity, further, promote the transfer of knowledge acrossboundary, has become a most important issue for a firm who struggle to improvecompetitive advantage.However, although the existing research has outlined the characteristics of networkresources and the competitive advantages they brought, there is a paradox aboutmechanism of how a firm’s guanxi embeddedness influence the transfer of knowledge,especially tacit knowledge. Around the above issues, this paper aims to answer the basicquestion of “how guanxi embeddedness influences inter-firm knowledge transfer”,struggle to open the ‘black-box’ of the mechanism. Specifically, this research questioncan be broke down to the following three issues. First, what is the relationship between aChinese firm’s guanxi embeddedness in network and its transfer of relative knowledgeacross boundary? Second, what is the mechanism of guanxi embeddedness acting on theinter-firm knowledge transferring? Third, what is the role of firm’s absorptive capacityplays in this mechanism?On the basis of the relatively complete and detailed review of the extent literature,the guanxi embeddedness is refined and dividend into two dimensions depending on theresearch contingency of the Chinese culture. This paper propose a theoretical modelsuitable to analyze and illuminate the mechanism of guanxi embeddedness acting on thetransfer of knowledge. The empirical analysis of this paper is divided into two stages. The first stage isEFA(exploratory factor analysis), which purpose is to measure the validity and credibilityof all variables in the original questionnaire and form the final questionnaire. The secondstage is CFA(confirmatory factor analysis), which aims to test the proposed theoreticalmodel and hypotheses by means of SEM(structural equation model). The main researchresults are shown below after the empirical analysis of the238valid samples.(1) Firm’s guanxi embeddedness in Chinese culture situation has significant andpositive effect on its inter-firm knowledge transfer.(2) It is of great difference on the impact of different firm’s guanxi embeddednessdimensions on the transfer of knowledge and firm’s absorptive capacity.(3) Guanxi embeddedness influences the transfer of knowledge indirectly throughthe mediating role of firm’s absorptive capacity.(4) It is of great difference on the impact of different firm’s absorptive capacitydimensions on the transfer of knowledge.(5) Chinese firm’s potential absorptive capacity has significant and positive effecton realized absorptive capacity.As a whole, based on relative literature such as KBV, network, absorptive capacityand organizational learning, focused on how guanxi embeddedness influence theinter-firm knowledge transfer, this paper conducts some theoretical innovations asfollows:(1) It’s a complement of the existing research on inter-firm network theories for itbuilds up linkage among theories of network embeddedness, absorptive capacity andorganizational learning to open the black-box of how relational embeddedness acts on theinter-firm knowledge transfer.(2) It is an enrichment of research on organizational learning and firm’s absorptivecapacity because it discovered unexpectedly a new path of “potential Absorptive capacity-realized absorptive capacity-knowledge transfer-competitive advantage”.