创业前职业流动与创业绩效——基于中国私营企业调查数据的实证研究

Pre-entrepreneurship Career Mobility and Entrepreneurial Performance:Evidence Chinese Private Enterprises Survey

个体职业流动是创业领域的核心变量,但鲜有研究关注职业流动与创业绩效的关系。结合我国创业者特征,本文重点考察创业者创业前职业流动对创业绩效的影响,并进一步探索它们之间的中介机制和边界条件。对2008-2014年中国私营企业调查数据进行实证分析,结果显示:职业流动频繁的创业者创业绩效更好,“跨界”流动者与“体制内”流动者的绩效更好,这验证了创业研究中的知识理论;社会资本在创业者创业前职业流动与创业绩效之间起中介作用;创新导向分别负向调节创业者创业前职业流动与社会资本、创业绩效之间的关系,这在一定程度上说明了创新和职业流动的替代关系。相关结论丰富了职业流动理论和以往关于创业绩效的研究,并为新创企业发展与战略转型提供理论支持,也为政府相关部门在鼓励和培养创业对象等方面提供参考。

Under the background of “mass entrepreneurship and innovation”, new ventures play an increasingly important role in China s economy. The survival and performance of start-ups have always attracted much attention, especially the high mortality rate of start-ups. Therefore, how to improve entrepreneurship performance has become an important issue, among which entrepreneurs personal characteristics are widely used to answer it. In view of the complexity of China s social and economic transition, the sources of entrepreneurs are diversified and characteristics of career change of entrepreneurs are unique in China, that is, there may be a wealth of career mobility before the establishment of enterprises. Career mobility refers to the flow of individuals including organization change, job change, occupational change and inter-industry and inter-regional mobility. Entrepreneurs career mobility will probably shape their follow-up attitudes and behaviors, which may then affect the performance of new ventures. Previous research on individual career mobility has been highly decentralized, focusing on the causes and results of career mobility. In particular, individual inter-organizational mobility can affect organizational innovation, organizational learning, relationship management and organizational failure. These studies emphasize the impact of career mobility on established organizations and tend to focus on managers. Individual career mobility is the core of entrepreneurship research, because it triggers the creation, transfer and destruction of resources and capabilities in different markets. Although Frederiksen et al.(2016) found that geography and industry mobility increased the possibility of individual entrepreneurship and had no effect on performance, they did not explore the mediation mechanism and the boundary conditions. To sum up, it further refines the previous career mobility of entrepreneurs, and constructs a theoretical model to explore the impact mechanism of career mobility on performance. An empirical analysis of the survey data of Chinese private enterprises from 2008 to 2014 shows that entrepreneurs with more frequent changes are better in entrepreneurship, and those with “cross-border” and “in-system” mobility perform better, which validates the knowledge theory;social capital plays a mediating role between entrepreneurs mobility and performance;innovation orientation negatively moderates the relationship among entrepreneurs career mobility, social capital and entrepreneurship performance, which to some extent explains the substitution relationship between innovation and career mobility. The contributions are as follows: Firstly, it finds out why some new ventures can survive smoothly and grow rapidly, while others die early. The deep-seated reason of entrepreneurs personal characteristics is that the pre-entrepreneurship career mobility will affect performance. It breaks through the limitations of previous static perspectives that focus on entrepreneurs previous work experience. Secondly, It not only finds the evidence that the amount of career mobility leads to the difference of knowledge and information stock, but demonstrates the explanatory differences between institutional capital and market capability advantages caused by different organizational mobility on performance. It earlier introduces the theory of individual career mobility into entrepreneurship research. Thirdly, it verifies the mediation mechanism of social capital in the relationship between pre-entrepreneurship career mobility and entrepreneurship performance, which clarifies human capital catalyzes social capital to facilitate entrepreneurship, and finds the impact of career mobility on performance varies with innovation orientation of new ventures, enriching the theory of career mobility and previous research on performance.