人情还是规则更重要?——不同行业制度环境下创业者社会关系与企业创新绩效的关系研究

Renqing or Rules?:The Relationship between Entrepreneur's Social Ties and Innovation Performance under Different Industrial Institutional Environment

获取有效资源是创业者和创业企业保持竞争能力的重要活动。本文在已有创业者社会关系类型区分的基础上,进一步考察了这些关系连带人格化水平的差异,以企业创始人为调查对象,对其社会关系连带与创新绩效之间关系进行实证研究,并探讨了行业制度环境完善度的调节作用。研究结果表明:首先,和商业关系相比,创业者的政府关系对企业创新成长具有更强的优势作用。同时,这种政府关系会随着行业制度环境的变化而产生动态的调整与迁移,随着行业制度环境的完善而形成逐步去人格化的发展轨迹。其次,不受正式制度保护的人情关系是无效的,人情与制度的关系在创新活动中更倾向于互补而不是替代。最后,创业者商业关系的过度嵌入将会对创新活动产生阻碍作用,这需要制度的进一步保护。

This paper tests the relationship between entrepreneurs＇ social ties and their firms＇ innovation performance. In this quickly changed world, creativity and innovation capability is very important to all the firms. Especially For entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial companies, innovation is the basis driving force to competitive advantage. Because individual entrepreneur is difficult to implements entrepreneurial opportunities with their own limited resources, therefore, acquiring useful resources from external supporters become an important task for entrepreneurs. Current research focus on how different ties （including business tie and political tie ） influencing firms＇ innovation activities and results. However, in China those ties possess more complex characteristics, one of which is that we use more personal and privacy relationship in our business activities. Therefore, in this paper, we extends existing social ties＇ typology （ business tie / political tie） into four kinds, which practically considering the personalization level of those entrepreneur＇s social ties （ based on Renqing or market rules）. From June to August 2011, we send research questionnaires over Guanzhou, Beijing, Shanghai , Hangzhou and Liaoning province. Taken firm founders and firm owners as our respondent, we surveyed 243 entrepreneurs and analysis the relationship between their social ties and firm innovation performance empirically. Most of their firms are entrepreneurial firms with high innovation and creativity orientation. We assume that both business tie and political tie will have significant influence on entrepreneurial firms＇ innovation performance, moreover, considering of different resource request and network building type under various industry environment, this paper also test the moderating effect of institutional environment of the industry. The results show that： firstly, compare with business ties, political tie can explain those firms＇ innovative growth more strongly. Data analysis shows that only political ties significantly affect innovation performance, business ties show no effect in linear regression process. Meanwhile, this system of political tie will change as the indusment path. Secondly, moderating effect of institutional environment shows political ties based on Renqing relationship are more effective when institution environment is mature, which is contrary to our expectation. Also, business ties based on Renqing can have positive effect to innovation performance when it mixed with high mature institutional environment. Those results illustrate Renqing ties without the protection of formal system is invalid, or even have a negative effect to firm innovation, also implicates that Renqing and institution tend to be a complementary relationship rather than substitutional relation in innovation activities. Thirdly, we further test the nonlinear model of business ties, interestingly, business ties based on Renqing shows an inverted U-shape relation to innovation performance, business ties based on rules shows a cubic relation to firms＇ innovation performance. Form those results we can conclude that entrepreneur＇s business ties have complex nonlinear effects on innovation performance, the over-embedding business tie will hinder innovation activities, which require further protect of institutional system. From this paper, firms may aware that relationship cost can be changed over firm development, we hope this study can provide some useful conclusions and ideas for current Chinese entrepreneurial firms, but the work does not finished yet. Relation embeddedness is an important but complicated issue in entrepreneurship activities, we just carry forward a small step to this research area. For further study, personalization of entrepreneurs＇ social ties can be divided more accurately by longitudinal study, which will help researchers and managers forming deeper understanding of the function of their social ties and networks.