The Influence Of R&D Personnel's Risk Preference On Innovation Performance

With the uprising uncertainty of the business competition environment, the enterprises that want to survive in such fierce competition and occupy a significant place need to be constantly innovated. Whereas, enterprise's innovation relies on the R&D personnel, and the level of innovation performance is directly related to its growth and development. Innovation is always uncertain and challenging, and is a highly risky task. The R&D personnel's attitude towards risk may lead to innovation performance difference: staffs who prefer risk tend to pursue risk initiatively and thus are more likely to choose risky decisions and take innovative actions. Whereas, high risk often means more income, thus may improve the innovation performance; on the other hand, person who hate risk may be unwilling to engage in such risky work, thus their innovation performance may be poor.Based on the theory of risk preference, innovation performance and psychological capital, this thesis carries on study evolved with �the effect of risk preference on innovation performance�, exploring the relationship between risk preference and innovation performance deeply. This thesis studied the following questions step by step:(1)the relationship between R&D personnel's risk preference and innovation performance;(2)the effect of personnel's psychological capital between risk preference and innovation performance;(3)the influence of R&D personnel's psychological capital on their innovation performance.This thesis carries on in-depth discussion through the combination of theoretical research and empirical research, literature reviewing and questionnaire survey, qualitative research and quantitative research method.This thesis carries out the literature review on risk preference, innovation performance and psychological capital firstly, and points out the hypothesis and model of this study based on the theory. Referring the existing mature scales, combined with the practical research need, the questionnaire of the study has been designed. The questionnaire has been used to investigate the R&D personnel in such areas as Hubei, Shanghai and Beijing. This thesis has used exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis to build and verify relevant measured scale, and has analyzed the data collected through correlation analysis, multiple regression analysis and hierarchical regression analysis, exploring the effect of R&D personnel's risk preference on innovation performance, the moderating role of R&D personnel's psychological capital in the relationship of risk preference and innovation performance and the effect of R&D staffs' psychological capital on innovation performance.Through the study, this thesis finally gets the following conclusions:(1)R&D personnel's risk preference is significantly positively related with their innovation performance, namely, compared to staffs who hate risk, staffs who prefer risk always have higher innovation performance;(2)R&D personnel's psychological capital is significantly positively related with their innovation performance, namely, it's appropriate to produce high innovation performance for staffs who have higher psychological capital;(3)R&D personnel's psychological capital positively regulates the relationship between risk preference and innovation performance, namely, the higher psychological capital the R&D personnel has, the significance of risk preference on innovation performance is more obvious.Compared with the previous research, this thesis mainly has such three innovation points:(1)Elaborating on the relationship among risk preference, psychological capital and innovation performance of R&D personnel under China's culture background; Revealing the moderating role of psychological capital between risk preference and innovation performance;(3)Exploring the relationship between R&D personnel's psychological capital and innovation performance.