Managerial Incentive and External Knowledge Acquisition Under Technological Uncertainty: A Nested System Perspective

Although an extensive body of literature has stressed the firm-level barriers or drivers for knowledge acquisition, little attention has been paid to the barriers and/or drivers nested within managerorganization subsystem. This article aims to explore the factors from nested system perspective by investigating the effects of manager's wealth-oriented and career-oriented incentives (COIs) on firm's external knowledge acquisition and the moderating effects of technological uncertainty. Four hypotheses are proposed and tested by the data from 607 Chinese firms. We find that COI has a positive effect, whereas wealth-oriented incentive has an inverse U-shaped effect on external knowledge acquisition. Furthermore, we also find that the effects of wealth-oriented and COIs are contingent on technological uncertainty. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.