| Since the central government put forward a major strategy of building an innovative nation in 2006,China's R&D(Research and Development)investment has substantially increased.The intensity of R&D investment has reached 2.11% in 2016,but there is still a gap with the average level of 2.4% in OECD countries.From the provider of the nation's overall R&D funds,enterprises are gradually becoming the major force in R&D.In 2016,R&D expenditures accounted for 77.5% of the national total R&D expenditure in China.Therefore,reasonable improving enterprise R&D investment intensity is an effective way to enhance the level of national innovation.But from the relationship between current enterprise R&D investment intensity and performance of the company,R&D investment can not actually change the enterprise profit and improve the enterprise value.In fact,the R&D investment is a risky investment,which has features like,uncertain results,high cost and long return period,etc.Especially for China in the period of institutional transformation,when the legal and information disclosure system is not very satisfying,the possibility of future environmental changes caused by R&D investment is even more difficult to estimate.How to carry out R&D investment scientifically and effectively and how to improve R&D performance will be one of the most important strategies for enterprises to increase economic benefits.The board of directors,as the authoritative organization of the company,is responsible for making and supervising strategic investment decisions.When facing highly uncertain investment project,the board will tend to look for references externally.However,director interlock,an important social bond of the enterprise,is able to deliver an affiliated company's comprehensive and specific information to the company.It is a good strategy to reduce the risk and improve the effectiveness by imitating the affiliate company's decision.The R&D investment is a high risk and high uncertain investment project for any companies,is there any imitating behavior among organizations having director interlock relationship in the decision-making process? If it does,does the imitation promote the company performance? When the company is faced with different external environment and director interlock is different,will it have an impact on the intensity of the imitation? And will there be any differences in the situation of different ownership and industry.If the company carries on the R&D investment intensity imitation,does the imitation is only mechanical imitation,or is in the full communication and learning process under the inspection?Based on the above propositions,this paper takes Chinese A-share listed companies having director interlocking relationship as the sample data,the enterprises that are inspected in this article are focal company,and the enterprises that have ties with focal company directors are interlock companies.We takes the social network theory,the organizational system theory and the organizational learning theory as the cornerstone.It verifies the existence and effectiveness of the imitating behavior of R&D investment intensity for the focused company;probes into the difference in R&D investment strategy imitation and performance under different circumstances;furthermore,the paper deeply analyzes the differences in the imitation behavior and performance under different ownership and industry;Finally,in order to verify whether the imitation has transformed from mechanical imitation to rational learning processes,the sample data has been divided into two groups based on the intensity of the communication between the focus company and the linked company,and further analysis has been taken place on these two groups of data.The empirical results of this paper are first found,in the listed company with director interlock connection,the focus company investment intensity of R&D is imitated among organizations,and the imitation has a positive effect on improving the performance of the company.The higher of the uncertainty of the external environment of the focus company,the more they tend to imitate the R&D investment intensity of the link company,but only the imitation formed in a stable environment can improve the performance of the company,and the more it occupies the central position of the director interlock's network,the more the focus companies tend to imitate the R&D investment intensity of the link companies,but the worse the R&D performance is,it shows that the investment imitation based on the information advantage of the network centrality is unfavorable to the improvement of the company performance.The reason for this is that companies located in the center of the network will have a busy board of directors,which limits the role of imitating information advantages.The stronger the connection between internal directors,the more conducive to imitating the intensity of R&D investment;however,the worse the performance of imitating R&D is.In the contrast,the weak association relationship formed by independent directors can restrain the imitation of R&D investment intensity,but all the imitative R&D formed under the weak relationship of directors have higher R&D performance.The higher the proportion of companies in the same industry or region are,the greater the isomorphic pressure will be,and the more the focus companies will be imitating the link companies;The larger the proportion of enterprises with scale or performance advantages in the connecting link companies,the greater the formation of isomorphism pressure,and the stronger the imitation of R&D investment by the focus companies.Only under the isomorphic pressure of scale advantage or performance advantage can the company improve its R&D performance,but under industry or regional isomorphic pressure,imitating R&D can not improve R&D performance.In particular,imitation R&D investment formed under industry isomorphic pressure will also damage the performance.To summaries,it is beneficial to improve R&D performance by adopting imitation link company's R&D investment intensity,but it is necessary to satisfy one of the following conditions,in a stable environment,the center of the director interlock network is low,the director connection relationship is formed by the independent director association or takes the scale advantage or the performance advantage,in order to make the imitation R&D promote the performance.Second,both state-owned holding companies and non-state-owned holding companies with director interlock have adopted imitation strategies in their R&D investments,but in comparison,state-owned holding companies have stronger imitation intensity.However,from the performance of imitating,the non-state-owned holding companies is better.For state-owned holding companies,when the director interlock connection is formed by internal directors,the company will choose to imitate the intensity of R&D investment.And in the process of imitation,they are more inclined to choose the company with the same industry,larger scale and better performance as the target of imitation.But the imitation R&D executed under the above circumstances has not been able to improve the company performance,especially the imitating R&D formed by the strong director interlock connection formed by the internal directors,has a negative effect on the company performance,which may cause by the redundant information brought by the strong relationship.If the state-owned holding company wants to improve its performance through imitation R&D,it can only be achieved in a stable environment.For non-state-owned holding companies,the external environment is uncertain.When it is located in the center of the network or the director interlock connection is a strongly formed by the internal directors,it will promote the focus company to adopt the strategy of investment imitation of R&D,and it will tend to choose to imitate the company which is in the same industry,in the same region,at the larger scale and has better performance.But in the above situation,only when the partner company with larger scale and better performance is chosen to imitate,the performance of imitation R&D is better.On the other hand,the imitation R&D has a negative effect on company performance.Generally speaking,the state-owned holding company,as a government agent,does not imitate its R&D investment on the basis of cost saving,risk reduction or performance improvement.If you want to improve their R&D performance by imitation,you have to choose to do so in a stable environment.For non-state-owned holding companies,choosing at the edge of the director interlock network,the director interlock connection is formed by the independent directors,in a stable environment and select the company with scale advantage or performance advantage as the imitation object,which are the effective way to improve the performance of imitation R&D.Once again,Companies with director interlock in high-tech and non-high-tech industries tend to imitate the intensity of R&D investment of the link company when make such decisions.By comparison,high-tech companies have stronger imitation intensity.From the point of view of imitating R&D performance,companies in the technology industry are also better at imitating R&D performance.For high-tech industry companies,being in the center of the network is more conducive to imitating the intensity of R&D investment,and in the process of imitation,it tends to choose the same industry,same region,a larger and better-performing company as the target of its imitation.However,in the above situation.imitation R&D performance is better only when a joint company with better performance is imitated.In the context of other imitation research failed to improve company performance level,and even imitate research network center formation has a negative effect on the performance.For the non-high-tech companies,when the uncertainty of external environment or the director interlock connection is strongly formed by the internal directors,companies tend to imitate the intensity of R&D investment,but the weakly linked connection formed by independent directors can inhibit the imitation of R&D investment.And the imitation process will tend to choose the same industry,the same region,larger scale and better performance company as the target of its imitation.But under the above circumstances,when the company chooses a larger company to imitate,the performance of imitation R&D is better;the director connection is weakly formed by independent directors.The performance of imitating R&D is good,but the imitating R&D in other situations can not improve the performance level of the enterprise,especially in the high uncertainty environment,the director connection is strongly formed by the internal directors.Imitation of R&D will have a negative impact on performance.In general,the choice of R&D investment intensity imitation strategies by high-tech industry companies can improve R&D performance,but only if their directors are less connected to the network center or it can be realized only when the company with performance advantage is selected to imitate,but the company in non-high-tech industry imitates under the connection of the independent director.Choosing firms with scale advantage as imitation objects or in stable environment can improve R&D performance.Finally,by comparing the imitation of R&D investment intensity under different communication intensity,no matter the communication intensity between the focus company and the link company is high or low,the director interlock will drive the inter-organizational imitation behavior of the R&D investment decision of the focus company.But under the high communication intensity,the R&D investment imitation intensity of the focus company is stronger.The information advantage formed in the network center can promote the company R&D investment imitation only after the focus company and the link company fully communicated;For imitating their own industry,the same geographical,larger scale and better performance link companies,it can only be achieved after a high degree of communication.When the focus company and the link company can't communicate fully,the independent director's supervisory function is more obvious,which to some extent inhibits the imitation behavior of the focus company.From the point of view of the imitation R&D performance with the different communication intensity,imitating R&D investment will improve the performance of the company,regardless of whether the communication between the focus company and the link company is high or low,but the performance of the imitation R&D with the high communication intensity is better.When the focus company and the link company can't communicate fully,imitating R&D based on uncertainty of the external environment,on high network centrality,on the same industry and on the same region are having negative effect on the R&D performance.In the case of high communication,this negative effect can be alleviated to a certain extent.At the same time,imitating R&D based on scale advantage and performance advantage of the link company,its positive effect on performance can only be realized with the condition of high communication intensity.Based on the above analysis,this paper believes that,high level of communication enhances transparency of information between focus companies and linked companies,helps companies to analyze multi-party information from the network,it further strengthens the intensity of inter organizational R&D investment imitation,and weakens the performance damage caused by the blind imitation of lack communication to a certain extent.This paper on the discussion the existence and the effect of R&D investment intensity imitation among direct interlock connection.The innovations are as following:First,the research on the influence of the director connections on R&D investment is expanded.In the past,the influence of directors on R&D investment was mainly based on their personal characteristics,such as their age,professional experience,educational background and technical background,etc.However,the possible influence of the director connections characteristic on R&D investment is ignored.Although there are some papers stated on the role of director connection attributes on R&D investment,the main concern of these paper is the political connections.But this paper examines the influence of the director interlock connection on R&D investment.It will make an incremental contribution to the research on the perspective that the attributes of the director interlock connection affect R&D investment decision.Secondly,it provides more evidence for the imitative behavior among the organizations in the director interlock connection.And as a channel of information transmission,scholars have demonstrated the conclusion of forming inter-organization imitation.However,whether there is an inter-organizational imitation of R&D investment in the director interlock connection,and the differences of the imitation behavior in different situations have not been systematically verified.Therefore,the conclusion of this paper makes an incremental contribution to the study of organization imitation and director interlock organization imitation.Third,Using the thought of previous researches to split variables.In order to obtain empirical data that can not be observed directly,the variables will be separated by regression of the equation.For example,this method is used in the study of earnings management and over investment.Therefore,in this paper,the regression equation of the relationship between R&D investment of the link company and R&D investment of the focus company is established,on this basis,the R&D capital intensity of the focus company is divided into two parts: imitating R&D driven by director interlock and R D driven by non-director interlock,which provides the data foundation for the future research on imitation R&D performance.Fourth,the effect of imitation R&D is verified by empirical data.Previous researches on imitation effect were mostly based on questionnaire survey and were rarely verified by empirical data.However,the questionnaire data will vary greatly according to the questionnaire designer,and the interviewee will also be affected by their subjective factors in the process of answering the questions.As a result,the data obtained through the questionnaire survey are subjective and error.Compared with the data obtained by the questionnaire,the empirical data are more objective and reliable,in fact,the results are more verifiable.Meanwhile,the research on the imitation effect of R&D investment is still in a few normative papers,and the research was based on questionnaire survey data.Therefore,this paper obtains empirical data of imitation R&D by splitting company R&D investment intensity,and then verifies the performance of imitating R&D,and makes incremental contribution to the research on the effect of investment imitation in R&D. |
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