大多数研究认为,善于利用社会关系网络的创业者更可能收获更高的新企业绩效,但对关系资源在促进新企业绩效中的角色并没有引起足够重视。针对这一问题,本文考察了创业者所利用的关系强度、关系资源与新企业绩效之间的逻辑联系,以及资源获取行为对该作用过程的中介作用。研究发现:在创业过程中,越丰富利用关系资源的创业者更容易整合到更丰裕的创业资源,从而提升新企业绩效。尽管所利用关系强度更高的创业者往往能以更快的速度获取创业资源.但并不能确保创业者能够迅速应付创业初期的资源需求,并不会改善新企业绩效。本文的主要理论贡献在于嵌入到行为层面揭示了社会资本改善新企业绩效的作用机制及资源获取的中介作用,发现网络嵌入性资源是有助于解释新企业绩效差异的重要变量,这是对已有文献的重要补充。
The existing literature has documented those entrepreneurs that mobilize social capital effectively will obtain superior new venture performance. However, the direct and indirect effects of the different dimensions of social capital on new venture performance have been explored to a lesser extent. To address this gap in the literature, this article investigates the direct effects of network resources and the strength of ties on new venture performance, as well as the indirect effects of resource acquisition.Following Lin (2001), this article conceptualizes network resources as those resources embedded in agents' networks and measures the construct through the name generator approach. Using survey data, the article empirically examines the relationships between network resources, strength of ties and new venture performance, as well as the indirect effects on new venture performance of resource acquisition. The results show that entrepreneurs mobilizing higher network resources can acquire abundant resources, and ultimately improve new venture performance. However, entrepreneurs mobilizing strong ties will acquire resources more rapidly, with no significant effect on new venture performance. The findings extend the network-based entrepreneurship literature by explaining the role of network resources in entrepreneurial processes, as well as explaining differences in how entrepreneurs obtain external resources, and the implications for performance. This article makes three major contributions to networkbased entrepreneurship research, as well as entrepreneurship research in general. Firstly, the article extends the existing literature on new venture performance by exploring the indirect effects of mobilizing social capital on new venture performance through resource acquisition. This provides a comprehensive explanation for the difference between new venture performance levels. Secondly, the results show that different dimensions of social capital have different effects on new venture performance, which