How do executives’ synergistic allocation and organizational slack drive enterprise technological innovation?

Abstract

Enterprise group is an important promoter to break the segmentation and achieve economies of scale. Technological innovation within the group is the key to improving market competitiveness, which has attracted common attention from academia and practitioners, but the decision-making mechanism of technology innovation in subsidiary is still needed. Based on the background of Chinese enterprises, through empirical analysis of panel data of 773 listed manufacturing companies for 5 consecutive years, we found: Parent-subsidiary executives’ synergistic allocation has a positive impact on the technological innovation of subsidiary; Parent-subsidiary executives’ synergistic allocation has a positive impact on the organizational slack of the subsidiary; The positive effect of executives’ synergistic allocation in parent-subsidiary corporations on the technological innovation of the subsidiary is realized by increasing organizational slack; Compared with private enterprise group, the positive influence of parent-subsidiary executives’ synergistic allocation on the technological innovation of subsidiary in state-owned enterprise groups is weaker; The longer the executive tenure is, the weaker the positive impact of organizational slack on technological innovation of subsidiary will be. On the one hand, this study enriches the theoretical research of technological innovation decision-making motivation; on the other hand, it provides empirical thinking for the improvement of parent-subsidiary executive collaborative governance mechanism and the improvement of governance efficiency.