| The independent director system as the core of corporate governance has been widely used both at home and abroad. The system has experienced more than ten years of development in our country, although it has become a legal requirement of the governance structure of listed companies in our country, but the system’s effectiveness is controversial starting from the date of introduction, because of the independent directors "sensible" phenomenon is widespread, even the system is considered to be formality merely. Academic study of the independent director system is mainly based on agency theory, on the basis of independent directors overall characteristics to explore the relationship of independent directors and corporate performance. Afterwards, researchers gradually abandoned the overall research perspective, starting from the individual member characteristics to study the effect of social capital on performance, although there are many related researches, but the role of independent directors in corporate governance has not formed a consensus of opinion.The motivation of enterprises to choose independent directors affects every enterprise’s unique social capital heterogeneity, also determines the role of independent directors in the enterprise, and will eventually effect to the performance. The choice of enterprise’s motivation will be affected by the dominant idea in the enterprise’s environment, the theories and research patterns currently used have been unable to fully explain the independent directors heterogeneity and the difference of the influence on the enterprise. With the emergence of system theory and gradually be introduced in management research field, the heterogeneity of organization behavior has more reasonable and convincing explanation. Therefore, this article is based on the theory of new institutionalism, starts from the motivation perspective of the enterprise selecting the independent directors’social capital, builds independent director selection and effect of the dynamic transmission model, analyzes deeply the factors which have a significant influence on the performance of independent directors’social capital, and test empirically the performance of path and effect based on different enterprise’s motivation choosing the role of independent directors, so that rich and perfect the research related independent directors’social capital, and provides reference opinions and system improvement measures of choosing the independent directors for listed companies.This article focuses on the two important questions:first, what motive or principle of listed companies based on to choose and employ independent directors? Second, whether the social capital of hired independent directors in the enterprise can have a significant impact on enterprise performance or not, only serving for the symbol of the "legitimacy" or really playing the "efficiency" to promote the performance?The study based on the following steps:firstly, study literatures comprehensively about the effect of independent directors’social capital on corporate performance; Secondly, analyze the motivation of enterprises to choose the independent directors, namely the legitimacy and efficiency motivation of the system guided by logic motivation, provides a solid theoretical foundation for the following empirical research; Then, build model from the perspective of legitimacy and efficiency of two choices motivation in this paper, we study and put forward the research hypothesis, analyze the regression of 131 listed companies on the Shanghai stock exchange and 61 listed companies on the Shenzhen stock exchange; Finally, use independent directors’professional background as indicators of social capital, according to the empirical analysis it is found that, industry background of independent directors’social capital has a significant role in promoting the enterprise performance both short-term and long-term; academic background of independent directors’social capital has a significant role in promoting enterprise short-term performance, no significant effect on long-term performance; political background, accounting background of independent directors’social capital has a promoting effect but no significant on both short-term and long-term performance of the enterprise; the legal background of independent directors’social capital has inhibition but no significant on short-term and long-term performance. |
