Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to explore how individuals can leverage interpersonal relationships and critical network position to acquire knowledge and information for generate research productivity. Specifically, this paper argues that the relationship between tie strength and scholar productivity will be an inverted U-shape, and critical position as moderating role in research productivity generation process. The robustness tests were also provided.
Design/methodology/approach
– Using panel data from scholars in tourism academic fields, this paper investigated the conditions under which maintenance of social relations affects knowledge creation. In total, two different regression models and robustness tests were used to test the hypotheses in a sample of 201 tourism scholars from Taiwan and an analysis of 1,198 publications.
Findings
– The results showed that the relationship between tie strength and scholar productivity will be an inverted U-shape. Moreover, the moderating role of critical position of structural holes and betweennesss are recognized: it positively moderates with tie strengths and research productivity.
Research limitations/implications
– The empirical results are derived from a sample of scholars in Taiwanese business management departments, thus raising concern about the external generalizability to other departments and countries. Future research is, therefore, suggested to empirically test the validity of the framework and hypothesis in other departments or countries.
Practical implications
– The practical implications of the results are that individuals need to know that there are two underlying governing forces on the choice of their knowledge exchange partners and occupying critical network position. A diversified social relation is beneficial to the knowledge creation performance because of more information knowledge sharing while a specialized knowledge would avoid the detrimental effects of coordination and conflict problems on research productivity. Therefore, individuals should understand and careful choice their cooperation partners and network position in order to achieve better knowledge creation outcome.
Originality/value
– This research extends developments in social capital theory and the relational view into interpersonal relationships between tourism scholars and their cooperation partners. Furthermore, the paper also examines how critical position has effects on scholar’s research productivity creation process. Finally, studies that examine the relationship between tourism academic networks and different measures of research productivity are few in number, and those that use such longitudinal empirical work are particularly lacking. This study addresses these issues.
