ABSTRACT
To better understand the relevance of intellectual capital for organisational performance in the Chinese context, and in particular the interplay among the different components of intellectual capital and their impacts on organisational performance, this chapter seeks to address the question of how intellectual capital impacts organisational performance in Chinese firms. The present study also seeks to widen the scope of study and to explore the value of intellectual capital from the perspective of two key company stakeholders: employees and customers. Structural equation modelling was used to test seven hypotheses with a data set of 139 Chinese firms. Our findings suggest that human capital significantly affects the market performance of firms via the mediating factors of structural capital, internal relational capital, external relational capital, customer value creation and employee job satisfaction while structural capital has the strongest impact on a firm’s market performance. In addition, internal relational capital positively affects employee job satisfaction while external relational capital significantly influences customer value creation. Our study is one of the first to investigate the relationship between intellectual capital and market performance, both directly and as mediated by employee job satisfaction and customer value creation, especially in the context of the world’s largest emerging economy, China.
