Talent Development, Compensation Incentives and Firm Competitiveness: A Comparative Study of Short-term Growth and Long-term Innovation

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-825-2_31How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Talent Development; Compensation Incentives; Firm Competitiveness; Corporate Innovation; Human Capital; Chinese Manufacturing Firms

Abstract

As Chinese manufacturing shifts from scale-based growth towards technology and innovation-driven development, human capital has become increasingly important to firm competitiveness. Nevertheless, earlier research frequently treats human-capital investment as a single construct and evaluates competitiveness using a single performance indicator, giving inadequate attention to how diverse talent-investment strategies may operate across different time horizons. This study examines Chinese A-share listed manufacturing firms over 2019–2024 and compares the effects of talent development and per-capita compensation growth on short-term and long-term competitiveness. Talent development is measured by the proportions of highly educated employees and R&D personnel, while compensation-based talent activation is measured by the growth rate of per-capita employee compensation. The results suggest that talent development, and specifically the talent in the R&D team, is more strongly associated with long-term innovation, whereas growth in per-capita employee compensation is negatively associated with revenue growth and, in some specifications, with patent output. The study makes a contribution to resource-based view theory by demonstrating that the effectiveness of talent investment is contingent upon the time horizon of performance evaluation as well as the form of investment.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Huimin Yan
AU  - Lidan Huang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/11/10
TI  - Talent Development, Compensation Incentives and Firm Competitiveness: A Comparative Study of Short-term Growth and Long-term Innovation
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 5th International Conference on Public Service, Economic Management and Sustainable Development (PESD 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 314
EP  - 322
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-825-2_31
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-825-2_31
ID  - Yan2026
ER  -