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- Ebadzadeh Semnani, Sedigheh Sarah
(författare)
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Trust in Different Types of Organizational Relationships : A Social Capital Perspective
- 2016
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The purpose of this thesis is to expand the understanding about the concepts of trust and social capital, and to explore their role in achieving desired organizational outcomes. The research followed a multiple case study approach, focusing on Iranian service providers. The reason for this focus is the insufficient scholarly contribution about social capital in developing countries. Moreover, considering the significant role of trust in social capital generation according to many scholars, this study seeks to understand how the issue of lack of trust in developing countries can influence social capital generation in these nations. In order to address the criticisms in the literature, this research first attempts to study the concepts of trust and social capital in different types of organizational relationships separately. There are, therefore, different levels of analysis in this study. The three types of organizational relationships which are the focus of this research are intra-organizational, organization-customer and business cluster.An intensive literature review was carried out on trust and social capital to build an overall theoretical picture of the problem at hand. The next step was to analyse the findings of this study by engaging both empirical and theoretical findings simultaneously. This was carried out with the aim of achieving answers to the research questions through theory matching and elaboration.The result of this study, in general, supports both the positive role of trust and social capital in achieving desired organizational outcomes. The empirical data and literature, therefore, seem to be in line with one another to a large extent. However, in several cases of this study the issue of lack of trust at the Iranian companies did in fact hinder the achievement of their desired outcomes. Moreover, the findings from the organization-customer and business cluster relationships showed that several of these Iranian companies are indeed already benefiting from social capital. However, they mostly benefit from the type of social capital arising from information flows. What they are missing, and are in fact in great need of, is the type of social capital associated with the benefits of trust. In other words, they were unsuccessful in bringing forward the benefits of the relational dimension of social capital. The study has also contributed towards refining the literature by showing that there are differences in the connotation of both “trust” and “social capital” when they are studied under different types of organizational relationships. Simply using these terms without specifying the type of relationship, or level of analysis, does not bring forward a clear understanding. Furthermore, the findings had pointed out the important difference between a contributing factor to a phenomenon and the phenomenon itself, which in this case were trust and social capital, respectively.Last but not least, the results of the cross-case analysis identified certain patterns and differences in the role of trust and social capital in different relationship types. These findings were summarized in the form of a proposed model and a matrix. The proposed model started with the development of trust in organizational interpersonal relationships, and ended with the creation of two different types of social capital that can benefit both the organization and its customers. The matrix, on the other hand, emphasizes the importance of keeping a balance between different types of social capital, depending on the organizational requirement, in order to achieve the best desired outcomes.
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| 2. |
- Hosseini, Mojtaba
(författare)
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The Internationalization of SMEs: An Interactive Perspective of Firm-Level Entrepreneurship and Network Structure
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The positive relationship of firm-level entrepreneurship and performance has received much attention in recent years and has become an attractive title in the entrepreneurship literature. This popularity encourages researchers to study the role played by the phenomenon on other organizational outputs such as internationalization. Until now, the majority of international studies have put their attention on the conceptual explanation of the interaction, and the number of empirical studies on the subject is few. Furthermore, almost all the empirical studies have been performed in developed and emerging markets, and developing areas such as the Middle East are nearly ignored.In the real context of Iranian business, policymakers support entrepreneurship as a proven way to improve the internationalization of smaller companies. Following this assumption, several supportive plans have been designed and executed which aim to increase the entrepreneurial status of SMEs as a way to enhance their internationalization. A question worth answering here is: Does having a better entrepreneurial stature mean better internationalization for Iranian SMEs? To answer this question and to fill the gap in the literature on the subject, this research explains the relationship of firm-level entrepreneurship and the internationalization of Iranian SMEs.To resolve the current conceptualization problem of firm-level entrepreneurship and to respect a broad conceptualization of entrepreneurship, a profile measurement model was employed in which companies are classified into four different groups: non-entrepreneurial, forced entrepreneurial, latent entrepreneurial, and actual entrepreneurial. This profile model incorporates the two popular constructs of entrepreneurial orientation and corporate entrepreneurship to determine the entrepreneurial stature of a company. Surprisingly, while the literature predicted the highest level of internationalization for actual entrepreneurial companies, the forced entrepreneurial firms showed the best internationalization in reality. The only exception was when the environments became very hostile, in which the actual entrepreneurial SMEs suppressed the forced entrepreneurial, showing better internationalization. These unexpected conclusions led the researcher to consider the complementary role of business networks. A case study approach was applied. The results revealed the importance of actor type in the decision to enter a foreign market, structural holes in identifying international opportunities, and network closure in realizing the opportunities. In simpler words, the forced entrepreneurial company held a better position to receive the information about international markets because most actors who dealt with them where international companies. In addition, it enjoyed an external network rich of structural holes and a dense internal network, which respectively facilitated the exploration and exploitation of subsequent international opportunities.All in all, however, firm-level entrepreneurship seems an important factor of companies’ internationalization that could somehow justify why entrepreneurial companies show better international activities than nonentrepreneurial firms, it is not able to explain how different types of entrepreneurial companies could hold different levels of internationalization. This is the mutual interaction of entrepreneurial status and the network structure that presents a powerful explanation of the difference in internationalization among companies. Therefore, researchers are invited to focus more on a configurational analysis of firm-level entrepreneurship, network structure, and internationalization, and policymakers are recommended to see both entrepreneurship and business networks when they design a supportive plan to improve the internationalization of SMEs.
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