The Moderating Effect of Knowledge Transfer on Satisfaction-Performance Relationship

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to examine the effect of satisfaction, with its basic antecedents of trust and conflict, on firm performance and to test the moderating effect of dyadic knowledge transfer on the satisfaction and performance relationship. A survey was applied to 193 participants working in medium and small-sized firms, operating in an Organized Industrial Region in Ankara- Turkey. Since measurement items were adapted from different studies, CFA was conducted to test discriminant and convergent validity and the hypothesized paths were tested using LISREL 8.3. The findings reveal that conflict and trust explain 76% of the satisfaction; and satisfaction itself explains 44% of the firm performance. As expected, both trust and conflict are proved to be the two indicators of satisfaction. Besides, we found significantly positive effect of satisfaction on firm performance. According to hierarchical moderated regression analysis results, conducted to test moderating effect of knowledge transfer for the whole sample, the interaction of satisfaction and dyadic knowledge transfer imposed negative, insignificant effect on firm performance, hence, hypothesis (H4) is not supported. Further analysis was conducted by dichotomizing the sample according to knowledge transfer, and research model was tested for each group. The effect of satisfaction on firm performance is found to be significant only when the dyadic knowledge transfer between firms is low, while the effect of is still insignificant when the level of knowledge transfer is high, providing a partial support for H4.