There are still some controversies over the effects of organizational slack on innovation nowadays. One side, different organizational slack take different effects,and ingnoring these differences may lead research astray. Another side, seldom research on organizational slack has testified functional mechanisms therein, and arguments about the organizational slack's advantages and disadvantages are still staying in the hypothetical stages. The third side, organizational slack's effects in large enterprises may be different than the effects in small ones, but seldom scholar studies the variation of slack's function among enterprises which have different sizes. Therefore, based on organizational behavior theory, this paper takes the organizational search (includes local search and cross-boundary search) as the mediating variables, and tries to uncover the mechanisms therein of organizational slack on production innovation, and the moderating effects of enterprises' sizes. This paper takes science-based enterprises as the samples, and 423 effective questionnaires have been got through investigations in six cities in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui provinces. By multiple linear regression analyzing on the data, this paper confirms that: (1) Absorbed slack has significant positive relationship with product innovation while the unabsorbed one doesn't; (2)Both of local search and cross-border search play partial mediating roles between absorbed slack and product innovation, but don't between unabsorbed slack and product innovation; (3) Relationships between these two kinds of slack and product innovation are both moderated negatively by enterprise's size. Research results about mediating effects in this paper can contribute for uncovering the blackbox between orgaizational slack and product innovation, and the results about the moderating effects of enterprises' size also provide important evidences and references for flexible choice on the existence forms of organizational slack. Moreover, these results also demonstrate that it's unscientific to analysis organizational slack's effects without considering the differences among various classifications and among various contexts.
Key words
organizational slack /
product innovation /
organizational search /
enterprise's size
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