Social Capital, Channel Strategy and Knowledge Flow: An Empirical Study of Multinational Companies in Taiwan

• Main Authors: Kuang-yi Hsieh, 謝光乙
• Other Authors: Shih-Chieh Fang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2003
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/18614891312427785487

碩士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 行銷與流通管理所 === 91 === Since the strategic importance of knowledge is getting increasing, only through exchanging, sharing and transferring knowledge with other internal or external units can individual organization trigger the cycles of knowledge creation, integration and storage. The sharing of tacit knowledge, however, is significantly contingent upon the social interactions. Therefore, social capital theory that stresses interpersonal and social relationships could be used to explain organization’s process of promoting knowledge flow. In this study, the author used「network centrality」and 「direct and indirect ties」for the structural elements of social capital,「trust」and「network identity」for the relational elements, and「consistent goals and visions」for the cognitive element. Moreover, the study separated the networks that multinational companies’ foreign subsidiaries were embedded into internal and external networks. Third, the study also took channel strategy of foreign subsidiaries into considerations to examine its moderating effects. The author found the social capital that foreign subsidiaries owned exactly contributed to the knowledge inflow from the internal and external networks. Second, the channel members’ trust and identity to their own channel network were significantly conducive to the quantity and uniqueness of knowledge inflow. Then, the more knowledge inflow could subsidiaries access, the better subsidiaries’ performance would reach, and the more knowledge outflow subsidiaries would provide to other corporate members or channel members.