How Does Social Capital Facilitate Knowledge Flows within a Business Group?

• Main Authors: Ming-Hsien Chen, 陳明顯
• Other Authors: Hsin-Peng Shiah-Hou
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/57448710026595815417

碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 管理學研究所 === 96 === Business groups are commonly regarded as important organizational structures in today’s modern economies. General speaking, headquarter plays the main role of coordinating all subsidiaries’ knowledge, and subsidiaries are both knowledge providers and knowledge demanders. If all the roles in business group accomplish their functions well, every unit enjoys the fruits of synergy. However, knowledge represents subsidiaries’ competitive advantage that is often not easy to spread. If subsidiaries shared knowledge with each other, they would dilute their own competitive advantages. Hence, many examples of the confliction between headquarter and subsidiaries related to knowledge sharing were happened in practice. Properly managing the subsidiaries’knowledge is very important for headquarter. This study attempts to link social capital and organizational learning concepts in exploring the driving force behind knowledge outflows of subsidiaries. Questionnaires are sent to leaders of marketing departments and R&D departments which are selected from 274 subsidiaries according to the database of business groups in Taiwan 2006 of China Credit Information service, Ltd. The amount of sending questionnaires is 410. Findings in the study are shown as follow: (1) As subsidiary acquires knowledge from a specific unit, headquarter or other subsidiary, and willingly transfers knowledge to that specific unit. (2) The knowledge that subsidiary developed by itself just transfers to headquarter but not for other peer subsidiaries. (3) Social capital would strengthen the subsidiary’s intention of transferring knowledge to headquarter and other peer subsidiaries, especially the later.