| Summary: | 博士 === 國立中正大學 === 企業管理所 === 94 === Hospitals have existed in highly competitive market based on knowledge economy. Under this business environment, hospitals should integrate several kinds of specialties efficiently and drive organizational innovation aggressively to enhance competitive advantage. More recently, strategic alliances have been frequently employed by hospitals as strategic tools. With the increasing usage of strategic alliances, alliance networks of hospitals have become more diverse. Therefore, we attempted to address the impact of alliance network diversity on organizational innovation. Since we argued the influence of alliance diversity would originate from knowledge benefits and limits, we hence adopted knowledge-based view (KBV) to analyze it.
Four research constructs generated by the knowledge-based view included inter-organization relationship knowledge store (IOR knowledge store), potential absorptive capability (PACAP), realized absorptive capability (RACAP), and external knowledge acquisition. Based on these constructs, we built up eight research hypotheses. The self-administered mail survey was employed to collect data. Questionnaires were mailed to 460 hospitals accredited as district hospitals and above. The informants were the top managers or alliance managers of these hospitals. The overall valid response rate was 35.45%. We finally obtained 138 samples excluding hospitals not joining any alliance. After testing sample representativeness, we adopted confirmatory factor analysis to test the construct validity of each research construct and hierarchical multiple regression to test our hypotheses.
Our findings indicated alliance networks of hospitals actually appeared diverse; the number of partners, unique local partners, and unique industries of partners were 21.24, 4.93, and 3.75. Alliance network diversity would affect organizational innovation directly, and the relationship between these two constructs exhibited an inverse-U curve. External knowledge acquisition would partially mediate this relationship in addition to direct effect. Further, PACAP and IOR knowledge store would fully mediate the relationship between alliance network diversity and external knowledge acquisition. RACAP would also play the mediating role in explaining the influence of external knowledge acquisition on organizational innovation. There was one other thing that is important for us. We found that the impact of knowledge gathered by hospitals from alliance networks on management innovation is greater than technological innovation.
According to the above research findings, we testified that alliance network diversity would direct and indirect affect organizational innovation of the hospital. Besides, KBV actually was a vital theoretical logic while managers and researchers discussed how to enhance organizational innovation by alliance network diversity.
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