Organizational level

Organizational level factors included interpersonal relationship, social relationship, organizational collaborative culture, and organizational climate.

The four topics were the organizational environment factors and belong the concept of the environment in SCT.

2.1.3.1 Interpersonal relationship

The interpersonal relationship at the workplace contained many

issues, such as conflict, communication, cooperation, and motivation (Strohmeier, 1992). Additionally, poor interpersonal relationship was able to cause stressor in the organization, and this condition occurred between coworkers, managers, customers, and sellers (Gunbayi, 2009).

Interpersonal relationship was not only establishing in physical space, but also existing in virtual or online community (Clarke, 2009). Feld (1997) described that the previous studies about interpersonal relationship generally paid attention to pairwise relationships, and search strengths in the feelings and interactions between individuals.

Strong interpersonal relationship could share their experiences with and influence from other people.

Kaše, Paauwe, and Zupan (2009) divided interpersonal relationship into three styles, which were structural relation, affective relation, and cognitive relation. Structural relation was a basic part of the pattern of interactions with an organization’s social network.

Furthermore, structural relation frequently means the intensity of face-to-face interaction between coworkers, and this interaction can facilitate knowledge transfer. Affective relation contains benevolence-based and competence-based trust, and the two kinds of trust are viewed as a critical important role in interpersonal knowledge transfer. Cognitive relation can be defined as combining the knowledge and capabilities from knowing other people, overlapping knowledge and related absorptive capacity of others, as well as sharing goals and language. Kaše et al. (2009) investigated information technology, web-based services, telecommunications, and professional service industries. The result showed the correlation matrix which presented the significant correlations between knowledge sharing and the three interpersonal relations. Moreover, they made use of regression analysis to predict knowledge sourcing and knowledge sharing, and both results

showed significant.

2.1.3.2 Social relationship

Social relationship could be considered as one study of social network; social network analysis was to discuss the social relationship among a group of actors (Yuan & Fei, 2010). In addition, the functions of trust should be put into social relationship, and the foundations of trust have to be social (Ammeter, Douglas, Ferris, & Goka, 2004).

Social relationship can be defined as a feeling of an individual connects to other people, and an individual considers that he/she belongs to a group. Therefore, when the researcher measured social relationship, they focused on the feeling of being of one group and obtaining social support (Bauer & Mulder, 2006).

Due, Holstein, Lund, Modvig, and Avlund (1999) introduced the function of social relationship included social support, social anchorage, and relational strain. Additionally, they proposed the concept of the previous studies which have presented the relationship between social relations and age and gender differences. Furthermore, Christensen, Stein, and Means-Christensen (2003) applied a social relations model to explain social anxiety and interpersonal perception, and the content was that using this model to discuss interpersonal perceptions of people with and without high social anxiety following the social interactions.

Therefore, social relationship involved with individual interactions and connections

2.1.3.3 Collaboration

Researchers treated collaboration as a phenomenon included structure for and process of ways in which organizations and communities work together to solve common problems and propose new ideas. In the viewpoint of structure, collaboration emphasized on communicative behavior, and for process, focused on the process of

communication, as well as environmental and contextual factors (Keyton, Ford, & Smith, 2008). Collaboration could be divided into systems collaboration and strategic collaboration. Systems collaboration means supply chain partners effort to make their communication systems compatible with each other and ready for forecasting and planning. Moreover, systems collaboration was a system-based common platform and to share information. Strategic collaboration refers to supply chain partners actually implement planning on business activities with a shared goal to jointly improve the long-term well-being of each other (Kim & Lee, 2010).

Several researches of collaboration have discussed about inter-firm or inter-organization collaboration issue, such as Kim and Lee (2010), Löfström (2010). For the opinion of firms, they collaborated with other companies and could facilitate innovation. (Un, Cuervo-Cazurra, &

Asakawa, 2010). Furthermore, collaboration was a strategic and shared important infrastructures or highly sensitive information. There was one important thing for collaboration, which was choice of the partners.

Collaboration refers to two or more individuals work together, so they have to understand each other and build a trustful relationship (Audy, Lehoux, D'Amours, & Rönnqvist, 2011). Therefore, individuals or organizations work together had to transfer and exchange different information and knowledge, and then create win-win.

2.1.3.4 Organizational climate

Organizational climate has a long history in social sciences study.

Climate initially was developed to help interprets important viewpoints of psychological environments of people (Dickson, Smith, Grojean, &

Ehrhart, 2001). Organizational climate can be defined as the common practices, shared beliefs, and value systems which are followed by an organization (Chen & Huang, 2007). What’s more, organizational

climate was a multidimensional construct, and it contained individual evaluations of work environment. The evaluations included general dimensions of environment (e.g. leadership, role, and communication) or specific dimensions (e.g. the climate for safety or customer service) (Neal, Griffin, & Hart, 2000). As reported above, organizational climate was the issue at organizational level and has one concept the same as potency, and which was the shared beliefs of members.

Organizational climate is thought to exert a strong influence on individual motivation to perform work outcomes. What’s more, organizational climate was evidenced to affect knowledge and skills through activities or training (Neal et al., 2000). Organizational climate played an important role for shaping behaviors of employees and impacting upon knowledge management of employees’ perception (Chen & Huang, 2007). Generally, the issues of organizational climate include the perceiving and feeling of the organizational members (Nystrom, Ramamurthy, & Wilson, 2002). But, organizational climate is a significant construct at organizational level, rather than the individual’s idiosyncratic descriptions of organizational features. The climate of organization is what people inside the organization say it is, and not what people outside the organization say or think it is (Dickson et al., 2001). When the organization develops climate, there are three sources: (1) common disclosure of organizational members to the same objective structural features; (2) attraction, selection, as well as attrition of organizational members, and contributing to a homogeneous set of members, and (3) social interaction results in shared understandings/meanings among organizational members (Dickson et al., 2001). Although organizational climate belonged to the issue at organizational level, it could shape and affect the behaviors and perception of employees.

The relationship in an organization not only referred to interpersonal relationship, the social network was very important, so social relationship was contained. Because the industries in Taiwan confronted many challenges, organizations encouraged workers work together and provided an appropriate environment for them to work.

Therefore, organizational culture and climate were critical factors for members of organizations.