Employee Human Capital,Labor Heterogeneity And Corporate Innovation

Innovation has emerged as a key driver for national growth,industry revitalisation and corporate development at the current stage.The development of China’s economy is now at a critical period from the pursuit of aggregate growth to structural adjustment,and the further exploration of innovation behavior and its connotation factors has become a core issue of common importance for economic players at all levels,from macro to micro.The unique nature of innovation,the asymmetry of inputs and outputs,the high fault tolerance of innovation teams and the high sensitivity to various influencing factors in the process of innovation output make innovation a common focus of policy authorities,practitioners and academics,along with the economic growth and organisational changes caused by technological progress.Innovation has been explored in many research fields for nearly 100 years.The topic of innovation has long been discussed extensively by the academic community in terms of the social and institutional environment,industry characteristics,capital market stakeholders and the influence of various players in the firm’s internal principal-agent chain.In both theoretical studies and empirical validation across different disciplinary dimensions,much attention has been paid to the innovation impact of the board of directors and executive characteristics at the top of the firm’s principal-agent chain,but on the other hand,the most direct executors of the firm’s innovation process,the innovation executors at the end of the principal-agent chain,and the important internal stakeholders of the firm-employees.This key human capital influence factor has not received sufficient attention and research.The natural subject-object logical link between human capital and innovation behavior constitutes a rich research scenario.Given the current environment of intense competition for talent at multiple macro and micro levels and the accelerated differentiation of employees’ functional status within the firm,the discussion of the specific allocation of human capital to employees at the firm level and the firm’s innovative behavior will become an urgent topic of research.Since the beginning of 1999,China Securities Regulatory Commission has put forward mandatory requirements on human capital information disclosure for the professional classification of employees of listed companies.At the same time,the Ministry of Science and Technology has also put forward mandatory requirements on the composition of technical employees in corporate based on the specific provisions of high-tech corporate identification.Relying on the policy soil of China’s capital market regulatory authorities and innovation management authorities,the human capital information disclosure of China’s listed companies contains long-term and continuous heterogeneous employee allocation details.The main conclusions are as follows:First,the total workforce collectively referred to as employees within a firm does not exist as a homogeneous collection of points;the static allocation ratios of employees in different professional disciplines of a firm have a heterogeneous effect on innovation,and in particular,the allocation ratios of skilled employees of a firm as a proxy variable for workforce heterogeneity have a clear impact on the firm.This paper finds that the higher the proportion of technical employees,the stronger the human capital for the implementation of innovation-oriented strategy,so as to produce a higher level of innovation output through the construction and collision of knowledge network within the team.The conclusion is still significant after the national high-tech corporate determination policy to alleviate endogenicity.Secondly,the difference in the level of pay gap among employees of different skill-set types within the corporate and the external pay gap of technical employees have a clear impact on the innovation output of the corporate.In this paper,the pay gap between technical employees and other types of employees is separated through the quantity difference of employee composition and total employee salary data.It is found that the internal and external pay gap of technical employees will have a positive promotion effect on the output level of innovation teams,which supports the prediction of tournament theory.Furthermore,the pay gap between senior executives and employees within the company has a negative impact on the innovation promotion effect of the pay gap between employees.Finally,there is heterogeneity between the turnover rate of the total number of employees and the turnover rate of employees in different professional categories within the corporate.This paper finds that,due to the essential difference of labor adjustment cost,the mobility motivation and ability of skilled employees are significantly better than that of other types of employees.The specific performance is that the turnover rate of skilled employees has a definite inhibitory effect on the patent output of corporate.Based on the big data of LinkedIn’s employees’ CVS,the employee mobility network among corporates was built.It was found that the corporate with lower degree of network center further strengthened the innovation inhibition effect of its technical employees’ dimission.The possible contributions of this paper are reflected in the following three aspects:First of all,this paper further enriches the empirical results of the literature on influencing factors of corporate innovation.The existing research results largely focus on the impact of executive human capital on corporate innovation.However,with the evolution of technological progress and innovation process,the importance of horse racing is increasingly prominent besides jockeys.Based on the unique data of Listed firms in China,this paper focuses on employees themselves and provides a large-sample and long-span verification.For employee heterogeneity human capital based on the technology of static configuration,dynamic accumulation and pay structure has carried on the thorough mining,and by using high and new technology corporate authentication configuration of employees and provides employees human capital based on the Chinese situation and the verification results of corporate innovation,innovation factors affecting this added a literature based on employees’interpretation of the human capital within the team.Secondly,this paper enriches the literature accumulation of human capital allocation and corporate behavior.Empirical studies on employee human capital,such as employee incentives and pay gap among senior executives,have long been based on the homogeneity hypothesis,which assumes that employees within an corporate are homogeneous and non-differentiated factor inputs.Compared with the in-depth studies on age heterogeneity,education heterogeneity,gender heterogeneity,incentive heterogeneity and other aspects of executive human capital,th e heterogeneous effect of employee human capital has not been systematically verified.In this paper,according to China’s listed company employee configuration,and brought the site employee turnover large data and multiple channels such as employee performance data,the employee of the configuration of the human capital and corporate innovation behavior validation to a certain extent,to fill the gaps in this part,for the academic community in the perspective of employee heterogeneity provides empirical evidences for the understanding of corporate behavior.Finally,the empirical evidence of this paper provides a way to understand the innovation-oriented structural transformation of corporate.Under the economic environment of the new normal,in the context of the extensive application of robot production,and in the face of the reality of labor substitution and shortage of technical talents,how can the innovation strategy formulated by corporate for sustainable development be achieved,and the structural adjustment of their own factor resources may become the optimal strategy at present.From labor elements of the structural configuration angle for the research of this paper,to verify the employee structure of the human capital distribution,dynamic flow and pay structure from three aspects of innovation influence level and specific influence mechanism,help to academia and practice of recent and future with a better understanding of the change of human capital structure.This paper suggests that employees,as stakeholders,play an important role of corporate governance.Employees’ human capital,like managers’human capital,should be paid enough attention to.Employees,still,are the core stakeholders of the corporate.