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經理人外部連結對新興產業內公司之表現影響
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1. Introduction
How do managers’ ties to other organizations affect firm performance? Prior research
has suggested that the social ties of individuals can be valuable to their organizations because
the connections can facilitate access to more in-depth sources of information; improve
information quality, relevance, and timeliness; increase the ability to get things down; and
enhance solidarity and legitimacy (Stuart, Hoang, and Hybels, 1999; Adler and Kwon, 2002).
Subsequently, these benefits of social ties may enhance an organization’s competitive
advantage.
However, studies examining the relationship between firm performance and social ties
of founders or boards of directors have presented conflicting findings (Peng and Luo, 2000;
Stam, Arzlanian, and Elfring, 2014). Moreover, relevant studies have largely emphasized the
direct influence of social ties on firm performance, ignoring the role of social ties as a
“facilitator” of both execution- and innovation-oriented task performance (Nahapiet and
Ghoshal, 1998; Moran, 2005), and the importance of industry-specific knowledge in creating
innovation by applying the external information, knowledge, and resources facilitated by
social ties (Dakhli and De Clercq, 2004). More critically, there is still a lack of empirical
support for the general belief that industry conditions determine the firm performance impact
of social capital (Stam et al., 2014). Therefore, this paper proposes and tests a model that can
explain the relationships among managerial resources, industry evolution, and firm
performance.
Building on social capital and experience-based human capital studies, this paper
suggests that firm performance in an emerging industry is directly affected by managers’
intra-industry experience and that managers’ ties to other organizations affect firm
performance indirectly by providing the direction for utilizing managers’ intra-industry
experience. As Ocasio (1997) indicated, the external ties of managers direct managerial
attention toward certain strategic threats or opportunities. We suggest that external ties
determine the capability of managers to detect business opportunities and threats,
subsequently guiding their intra-industry knowledge and influencing firm growth. Moreover,
this paper proposes that the indirect benefit of managers’ external ties decrease as the focal
industry evolves because managers’ external ties should align with the informational
requirements of the firm’s strategy to enhance organizational performance (Geletkanycz and
Hambrick, 1997) and because the information source for innovative ideas would shift to
areas more local to the firm (Gort and Klepper, 1982).
The proposed hypotheses are tested by examining firms that entered the U.S. cellular-