企业社会责任对技术创新绩效的影响机制——基于社会资本的中介效应

Impact mechanism of corporate social responsibility on technological innovation performance: The mediating effect based on social capital

企业履行社会责任(Corporate Social Responsibility,以下简称CSR)能够取得经济、社会、环境等多重效益。对于CSR能否促进技术创新绩效,学界尚存在较大争议。本文以此为切入点,以2013—2017年沪深A股制造业上市公司为样本,基于利益相关者角度,采用泊松面板回归研究CSR对技术创新绩效的非线性影响,并进一步探讨社会资本的中介作用和市场竞争强度的调节作用。研究表明,CSR对技术创新绩效具有倒U型影响;社会资本是CSR影响技术创新绩效的中介变量,企业通过履行CSR积累社会资本,进而促进技术创新;此外,市场竞争强度负向调节CSR对技术创新绩效的影响,市场竞争激烈时,社会责任履行对技术创新的促进作用及超过阈值后的阻碍作用都将减弱。

In the new stage of high-quality economic development,corporate social responsibility requires enterprises comprehensively consider the coordinated development of economy,society and environment.However,due to the lack of CSR,the frequent occurrence of"toxic milk powder"and"fake vaccine"is still serious.How to make enterprises no longer regard CSR as a burden and benefit from it is an urgent task.Innovation is important for sustainable development of enterprises,featuring high inputs and high risk.The implementation of the CSR strategy can effectively abate the asymmetry of information between stakeholders,which can reduce the uncertainty of the innovation and improve the innovation performance.Therefore,if an enterprise can obtain innovation resources by fulfilling its CSR,that is,social capital,and then promote technological innovation,it can encourage enterprises to take more CSR and improve the performance of technological innovation.From the existing research,different scholars have gotten diverse research results on whether enterprises can promote technological innovation by fulfilling CSR.Most studies have proved that In the process of fulfilling CSR,enterprises can gain many convenient conditions from stakeholders to further engage in technological innovation.At the same time,some scholars believe that the fulfillment of CSR may occupy some resources that could be used for R&D,and then bring negative impact on technological innovation.This paper holds that there are two reasons about the contradictory views:(1)The relationship between CSR and technological innovation performance has been simply treated as a linear relationship.If there is an inverse U-shaped relationship between them,different results may occur;(2)The impact of CSR on technological innovation is the result of multiple factors,which means the relationship may also be affected by other factors.In addition,most of the existing studies explore the direct relationship between the two,and few literature analyze its internal mechanism.In view of the above analysis,this paper proposes the following two questions.(1)Can CSR promote technological innovation performance?(2)Does social capital plays a mediating role?In order to answer these questions,this paper selects 277 A-share manufacturing listed companies from 2013 to 2017 as empirical samples and constructs the measurement index system from the perspective of stakeholders.In this paper,poisson panel regression model is used to study whether CSR has an inverted U-shaped impact on technological innovation performance and the moderating effect of market competition.What’s more,bootstrap model is used to study the intermediary role of social capital.The empirical results are as follows:First,fulfilling CSR can promote the performance of technological innovation,but when it exceeds a certain threshold,it will hinder the technological innovation of enterprises.That is,the impact is inverted U-shaped,and there is a"turning point".Due to the poor performance of overall CSR in China,the level of corporate social responsibility has not reached the"turning point".Second,in the impact of CSR on technological innovation performance,12.38%comes from social capital,which means that social capital plays a part of intermediary role in the impact of CSR on technological innovation performance.Third,market competition intensity negatively moderates the effect of CSR on technological innovation performance.When market competition intensity increases,the role of CSR in promoting technological innovation will be weakened.This paper mainly contributes to the area in the following aspects:First of all,this paper studies the non-linear effect of CSR on the performance of technological innovation,which is helpful for enterprises to find the best value of CSR.What′s more,keeping the performance within a reasonable range will avoid the negative impact of excessive social responsibility,and maximize the incentive effect of CSR.Secondly,the paper introduces social capital and adopts bootstrap model to reveal the intermediary path of CSR affecting technological innovation performance,which makes enterprises more clearly understand the mechanism of the impact of CSR on their own innovation capabilities,and encourages them to establish and maintain friendly relations with stakeholders in the process of fulfilling CSR.Finally,the paper discusses the moderating effect of market environment,which clarifies the difference of the effect of CSR on enterprise technological innovation performance under different market competition conditions,and helps enterprises to correctly view the market competition intensity,and then realizes the collaborative development and decision optimization of CSR and enterprise innovation.