Following the research findings published by the SSCI-indexed journal Journal of Economic Perspectives (one of the first five journals on economics in the world) in February this year, the paper entitled “How middle managers’ participation in decision-making influences firm innovation performance: Evidence from China Employer–Employee Survey Data”, written by the research team of Professor Hong Cheng, was recently published by China Management Studies, one of the SSCI-indexed journals owned by Emerald Publishing.
Existing literature has manifested that firm innovation performance has been largely effected by middle managers’ ability to allocate external-internal resources, whereas Chinese firms are characterized by middle managers’ access to abundant social capital and connection, and this individual firms rely heavily on the relationships with government officials in China, thus their innovation ability has been restrained. Hence this paper aims to re-examine the effect of middle managers’ participation in decision-making (DM) on the innovation performance of Chinese manufacturing firms, and also testifies the intermediation channels regarding how middle managers’ participation influences firm innovation performance by testing the mediating effect.
By constructing a model that determines firm innovation and tests the hypotheses with econometric regressions using first-hand data from the China Employer-Employee Survey (CEES), and by controlling the characteristics of middle manager personnel, entrepreneurs, frontline worker, firm, industry and country, semiparametric and intersectional regressions are used to show how middle managers’ participation in DM influences Chinese firm innovation. Thus this paper empirically shows that middle managers’ participation in DM has a significantly positive effect on firm innovation. After testing the mediating effect, the findings show that the improvement of middle managers’ DM participation leads to a certain increase in technicians and a reduced dependence on government. In this regard, middle managers’ participation is complementary to the human capital of entrepreneurs.
It is reported that China Management Studies is a SSCI-indexed journal focusing on the research of the management of firms in China and distributed by Emerald Publishing, which was founded in 1967 by the scholars coming from Bradford University Management Center. Today Emerald Publishing continues to be committed to the expert review of journals in the field of management, library science and engineering science and the publication of books of humanities & social sciences.
Full text: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/CMS-12-2016-0253