Research On The Relationship Between Multiple Negative Performance Feedback And R D Intensity In A Cognitive-behavioral Perspective

With the new round of industrial revolution and the transformation of the global industrial competition paradigm,China's manufacturing and economy have entered the key transition period from factor driven to innovation-driven.The research and development investment plays an important strategic value in the process of establishing competitive advantage.The research shows that the R&D investment of Chinese firms is seriously insufficient,and how to improve the R&D investment of Chinese firms has become a concern.For this problem,the preliminary research mainly discusses the important factors that influence the R&D investment of firms from the perspective of industrial base,resource base and institutional foundation.These three perspectives focus on the impact of the industrial structure,resource heterogeneity,institutional environment on firm's R&D investment,but for the mechanism how these objective factors are recognized and interpreted by the firms and ultimately affect their behaviors,we have not yet discussed fully.With the development of theory and practice,more and more scholars have begun to explore the cognitive-behavioral factors that affect the R&D investment of firms from the behavioral perspective or cognitive perspective and have drawn many inspiring and influential research findings.However,the results and conclusions of the study began to diverge greatly.For example,the behavioral theory of the firm argues that the performance-aspiration gap will trigger firms to reflect on the deficiencies and problems of current business strategy,improve its tolerance toward risks,and thus have a positive impact on R&D investment.Threat rigidity theory,on the other hand,argue that,in the face of the negative performance feedback,corporate give priority to the issues of survival,and thus have negative effect on R&D spending.Moreover,from the comparison of domestic studies and foreign studies,most domestic research results have followed the paradigm of western classical theoretical research,which need to be strengthened in the construction of indigenous theories.This paper argues that there are two reasons for the divergence or limitations of these studies:(1)Previous research study the linkages between behavior and cognition of firms.They only examine the response of firms to the results of performance feedback separately and ignore the role that the organization's understanding of the negative performance feedback plays in the process of firm R&D investment.(2)The previous studies did not reveal enough about the important role China's situational features play in shaping corporate cognition and behavior,neither did they consider the strategic flexibility of multiple organizational goals in the transition economies.They also did not conduct an in-depth analysis of the characteristics of the Chinese context.Based on the above two considerations,this paper studies the problem of negative performance feedback and corporate R&D investment based on cognitive-behavioral perspectives.Based on the grasp of the context in China,this paper considers the impact of multiple negative performance feedback on corporate R&D investment and the moderating effect of situational factors that affect firm's cognition toward negative performance feedback.This paper studies the following three questions: How does the multiple negative performance feedback affect the R&D investment of firms? In the face of inconsistent performance feedback,what is the difference between historical and social performance feeback on corporate R&D investment? What is the moderating effect of the hetoergeneity of Top management team and the situational factors?In the complete reasoning on the basis of the theoretical model and hypotheses,we selects the the listed manufacturing companies during 2008-2015 as research samples to test the hypotheses,and examine the relationship between multiple negative performance feedback and the corporate R&D behaviors.The research of this paper has been found as follows: compared with the consistent negative performance feedback,the inconsistent negative performance feedback have greater negative effect on firm's R&D investment.Compared to high social negative perforamcne feedback-low historical negative performance feedback,low social negative perforamcne feedback-high historical negative performance feedback group has lower R&D intensity.The characteristics of the top management team and the internal corporate governance structure and the external regional system environment all play a significant role in moderating the relationship between multiple negative performance feedback and firm's R&D intensity.Overall,this study established a cognitive-behavioral model in which firm adjust its aspiration level based on the multiple performance feedback.This model makes up for the blank of previous research on the issue of performance feedback of firms' cognition and participation,which is of great significance for further research on the influencing factors of R&D investment under the cognitive-behavioral perspective.This model makes up for the blank of previous research on the role of firm's cognition of performance feedback,which is of great impact on firm's R&D investment.In particular,we brings together contextual factors such as the executive team and its internal and external environment into the performance feedback model of corporate R&D decision-making.This makes up for the lack of attention paid to the discussion of situational mechanisms in the past,which paid more attention to the direct effects of management expectation disparity on decision-making behavior.This has a certain positive effect on improving and constructing performance feedback theory and the behavioral theory of the firm.