It's whom you know and what you know: A social capital perspective of the effect of small firm organizational learning on firm performance.

摘要

Extant entrepreneurship literature attributes mortality among small firms to various factors including undercapitalization, poor cash flow management, limited managerial skills and too restrictive or expansive market breadth (Chaganti, DeCarolis & Deeds, 1995). We consider Stinchcombe's (1965) suggestion that relationships with external stakeholders may help firms to survive and grow. Additionally, given the importance ascribed to knowledge and the knowledge worker in the 'New Economy' (Hamel & Prahalad, 1996), we also explore how access to knowledge and organizational learning might benefit small firms. In sum, we use social capital and knowledge management to study small firm performance.;We employed both qualitative and quantitative research methods. Our quantitative hypotheses tests analyzed survey data from a sampling frame of small, independently owned businesses via ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. Our qualitative analysis involved semi-structured interviews of three entrepreneurs.;Both our quantitative and qualitative data show that strong ties with suppliers, competitors and customers positively impact access to both business and organizing knowledge. Though un-hypothesized, our qualitative analysis also revealed that the Internet, popular magazines and trade publications are sources of business and organizing knowledge. Contrary to our predictions, social resources were shown to negatively associate with access to both business and organizing knowledge. In support of our hypotheses, entrepreneurs with an internal locus of control were shown to possess strong ties with their external stakeholders. We also obtained support for our predictions that access to these forms of knowledge positively associates with generative organizational learning. Furthermore, the survey data corroborated our hypothesis that organizational social capital would strengthen the positive relationship between access to business knowledge and organizational learning. On the other hand, this data indicated that organizational social capital weakened the positive impact of access to organizing knowledge on organizational learning. Organizational learning was found to positively affect firm performance.;We also conducted several comparisons of our respondents with one another. As predicted, small African-American firms had weaker ties with customers and suppliers than peer firms. In contrast to our prediction, they showed stronger ties with competitors than others. Female-owned small firms reflected stronger ties with customers and suppliers and weaker ties with competitors.