關係學習、關係記憶與關係績效之研究

An Exploratory Study of Relationship Learning, Relationship Memory and Relationship Performance

夥伴關係為企業重要的資產之一，為了妥善管理夥伴關係，組織必須發展相應的關係能力，而關係學習與關係記憶則是培育關係能力之重要的管理活動。本研究探討關係學習與關係記憶對於關係績效的影響，並且驗證組織間社會互動對於關係學習與記憶之干擾效果，實證結果發現：關係學習顯著影響關係記憶與關係績效，且關係記憶亦會影響關係績效；此外，組織間社會互動具有干擾效果。本文最後提出管理意涵與研究建議。

In a knowledge-based economy, the accumulation of knowledge enables the business to facilitate the building of a sustainable competitive advantage, which makes the acquisition of knowledge has become an everlasting pursuit for the business. Persistently obtained and formulated through internal learning and external partnerships, an effective knowledge acquisition requires the learning competence and sharing willingness of a business. Hence, the relationship among participating organizations is considered as the key factor in initiating the willing and intention of knowledge sharing and stimulating the dissemination and accumulation of knowledge. Because of this, a close, mutual trusted and well-connected partnership of all stakeholders’ serves as one of the most important strategic assets. That is, it is requisite for a business to cultivate its relational capabilities via continuous knowledge creation and aggregation. Due to the fluid property of knowledge, in a highly competitive business environment many enterprises obtain and accumulate knowledge resources through the partnership establishment. Along with the prevalence of relationship learning, the issue of relationship memory has drawn comparable attention because of its capability of storing the relationship learning results and propelling the retrieval and exchange of knowledge. That is, through the sharing of information, the dissemination and interpretation shared among partner organizations, relationship learning represents a process of knowledge creation, where relationship memory consists of interactional, functional and environmental knowledge learned from the formulation of a partnership. In addition, the partnership development relies on the interaction among all participants involved. Therefore, it is expected that inter-organizational social interaction plays an interference role between relationship learning and relationship memory. This study explores the influence of relationship learning and relationship memory on the buyer-seller partnership and evaluates the corresponding performance, where the moderating effect of inter-organizational social interaction between relationship learning and relationship memory was also investigated. The survey sample is consisted of the response from purchase managers of the largest 5,000 Taiwan industries in the year of 2004, where a total of 1,000 questionnaires were distributed to 2,855 managers in the manufacturing industry and 158 effective samples were collected. The major findings indicate that relationship learning is beneficial to relationship memory and its corresponding performance; relationship memory in turn has significant impacts on relationship performance, and the interorganizational social interaction plays a moderating role between relationship learning and memory. First of all, the success of relationship learning lies in the accumulation of information, experience and knowledge through all participating organization cooperation. Therefore, compared to a partnership lack of relationship learning and memory, its counterpart (i.e., the one with high motivation to establish relationship learning and relationship memory) turns out to be more competitive. Second, relationship learning has an influential impact on the partnership performance and enhances the improvement of partnership satisfaction. Furthermore, whenever there is a closer interaction relationship among participating organizations, more beneficial influences on relationship learning performance and relationship knowledge accumulation are anticipated. Finally, three kinds of relationship memory influence on relationship performance, in which there are intermediate effects among these three types of knowledge accumulation.