The Effect Of Employees’ External Relationship Capital On The New Hiring Companies’ Knowledge Innovation Performance

New employees in the organization will bring their ideas,methods and experience developed in the original company,so that the company can learn new ways of doing things.Most of the previous studies have discussed the impact of social relationship network,social capital and other relationship capital at the macro level of enterprises or organizations on enterprise innovation performance,dynamic capabilities and organizational innovation,but lack of discussion on the relationship capital at the individual level of employees in organizations.Secondly,most of the existing studies discuss the antecedent factors and result effects of the relationship capital of existing organizations,while few studies focus on the individual relationship capital to the mobile employees.Furthermore,although scholars have provided interesting insights for relational capital from the perspective of network and management,there is still much to be understood about the conditions under which relational capital can flourish in organizations and the mechanism of its benefits.To sum up,this paper puts employee external relationship capital,cooperative network restructuring and knowledge innovation performance of mobile employees into the same theoretical research framework,and investigates how employee external relationship capital and past performance regulate the relationship between employee cooperative network restructuring and knowledge innovation performance.By collecting the second-hand patent data of Chinese biotechnology enterprises from 2012 to 2020 from Inco Pat patent database,the data were analyzed and hypothesis tested by SPSS and other empirical analysis software.The results are as follows:(1)The external relationship capital of employees is positively correlated with the reconstruction of cooperative network;(2)The inflow of employees’ external relationship capital is positively related to the performance of organizational knowledge innovation,and can be positively adjusted through the reconstruction of cooperative network.That is,the reconstruction of cooperative network plays an intermediary role between the inflow of external relationship capital and the performance of knowledge innovation;(3)Employee past performance plays a positive moderating role between external relationship capital and cooperation network reconstruction,as well as external relationship capital and knowledge innovation performance,and positively moderates the mediating role of cooperation network reconstruction.Based on the theoretical and practical background,this study reveals the impact mechanism and boundary conditions of employee external relationship capital on organizational knowledge innovation performance.These efforts have enriched the existing theories on individual relationship capital to a certain extent.And the research conclusion of this paper can provide practical enlightenment for enterprises to recruit and select suitable employees.