谁是更直接的创新者?——核心员工股权激励与企业创新

Who Are More Direct Innovators? Core Employee Equity Incentives and Innovation Output

高管和核心员工是企业创新活动中最重要的两类人力资源,同时也是股权激励方案的两大主要激励对象。现有研究多关注高管股权激励对企业研发投入的影响,忽视了同样作为股权激励对象的非高管层核心员工在创新产出环节起到的重要作用。创新成败的评价不能仅仅关注创新投入,还应该关注创新产出。作为创新产出过程中最直接的参与者和创新计划的执行者,核心员工的能力和努力程度会直接影响创新成果产出的数量和质量。本文考察了以核心员工为代表的非高管层员工股权激励对创新产出的影响,实证结果显示,对核心员工实施股权激励能够促进企业增加创新产出的"数量",提高创新产出的"质量"。进一步考察核心员工股权激励强度和股权激励方式对创新产出的作用发现,核心员工股权激励强度与专利产出显著正相关,而高管股权激励对企业创新产出环节的促进作用并不明显;相比于限制性股票,核心员工股票期权对创新产出的激励效果更显著。此外,本文还发现,产权性质会影响股权激励有效性的发挥,国有股权比例的增加会降低员工股权激励对企业创新的促进作用。

Innovation has become an increasingly important corporate strategy that boosts the long-term growth and enhances the competitiveness of a firm. Corporate innovation is composed of three parts, namely the innovation input, innovation output and technology achievement transformation. The complete internal principal-agent network also includes three stakeholders, which are shareholders, executives and non-executive employees. In terms of in- novation, the process of input and output are all likely to have the problem of agency. Some previous studies have found that, as a kind of long-term mechanism, equity incentive can effectively alleviate the agency problem between shareholders and executives, and encourage executives to increase innovation investment. Since the ownership and management have been detached, the incentive model based on stock provides property incentive to executives so as to inter the externality. Executives and core employees are the most important two kinds of human resources for corporate innovation, and they are also two main incentive targets of equity incentive scheme. As such, how to design an appropriate in- centive mechanism to foster innovation productivity constitutes a challenge to firms＇ innovation practice. We should not only pay attention to innovation input when assessing the success or failure of innovative activities, but also should focus on innovation output. As the most direct participants in the process of innovation output and the per- formers of research and development plans, core employees＇ ability and the level of effort will directly affect the quality and quantity of innovation output. While previous studies mostly emphasize the importance of managerial incentives in innovation input, our pa- per focuses on the role of core employees in innovation output. This paper analyses the effects of core employee eq- uity incentives in innovation output. We demonstrate that the core employee equity incentives can promote corporate innovation. More specifically, core employee equity incentives are more strongly related to innovation output than executive equity incentives after controlling for other variables. That is, the core employees are more important in- novators in the process of innovation output. Stock options and restricted stock are main types of equity incentives. Based on the Black-Scholes option pri- cing model, the value of stock options are positively related to the volatility of stock return, that means stock options have the risk-taking incentives. However, the value of restricted stock is positively related to the stock price, in a sense, it has the incentive effect of risk aversion. Our findings incentives is more pronounced when using stock options Furthermore, we examines the influence of the nature indicate that the positive effect of core employee eq- as incentives. of property rights and the proportion of state-owned shares. Previous studies have found that the effectiveness of the incentive factors is different between the state- owned enterprises and non-state-owned enterprises. Consistent with this, we find that compared with stated-owned enterprises, the positive effect of core employee equity incentives is more significant in the non-state-owned enter- prises, and it will be weakened with the increase of the proportion of state-owned shares. The causal relation between employee equity incentives and innovation can be bidirectional. On account of the false regression caused by endogenous problems, our findings may not convincing. For example, the companies which implemented equity incentives may have higher levels of innovation. To alleviate the concern about reverse causality, we have done a series of robustness tests to make sure that our results are reliable. Collectively, based on the agency problems exist in the process of innovation output, this study focus on the relation between the core employee equity incentives and corporate innovation, and find the positive relation be- tween the two. Our findings emphasize the importance of core employees in the process of innovation output, and provide evidence for the differences between stock options and restricted stock. Furthermore, our paper supports the implementation of employee stock ownership plan（ESOP） under the background of mixed ownership reform in China.