Corporate Strategy, Pay Gap and Employee Turnover Rate: Based on Mediation Model

Abstract

The characteristics of prospector are to constantly find new market opportunities, carry out technological innovation, and obtain growth opportunities by moving to high value-added fields. Defender often choose a relatively stable market area and take effective actions, such as setting competitive prices or providing high-quality products and services, to actively prevent subsequent competitors from entering this industry. Although different strategic types of enterprises have different business preference, they cannot do without the active cooperation of employees in the process of strategy implementation, because they are the closest to the production and customers. If the incentive mechanism conflicts with employees' interests, employees may respond by leaving. Based on the sample of China's A-share listed companies from 2007 to 2019, this paper uses the fixed effect model to examine the impact of strategy on employee incentive mechanism and turnover rate. The empirical results show that, compared with defender, the pay gap of prospector is higher, and the above phenomenon is more significant in enterprises with lower labor intensity. In addition, prospector will also push up the turnover rate of employees, in which the pay gap plays a mediating role. This conclusion not only enriches the research of strategic theory and compensation contract, but also has some enlightenment for the relevant government departments to develop vocational training to improve employees' skills.