VENDOR'S PERSPECTIVE ON SOCIAL CAPITAL AND ABSORPTIVE CAPACITY FOR OFFSHORE CONTRACT PERFORMANCE.

Abstract

Taking an offshore vendor's perspective, the paper develops and tests a 'knowledge management (KM) centric offshore contract performance model' examining whether the amount of social capital (SC) between the client and vendor and the vendor's absorptive capacity (AC), together affect knowledge transfer (KT) and knowledge combination (KC) processes. Further, the relationships of KM processes with the offshore contract performance are also explicated. Results provide insights into the relative importance of both SC and AC in affecting the extent of KT and KC in client-vendor relationships, providing a theoretically parsimonious reference 'offshore contract performance model' for future research.