Abstract: SMEs often make up for lacking in normative and detailed plans, systems and organizational arrangements with remaining some human resource slack, but the effectiveness of these practices is questionable. Basing on characters of the knowledge owned, human resource slack can be sorted into unembedded ones, low-embeded ones and high-embedded ones, and funcitons of them on enterprises need more classification studies. This paper analyses the action mechanisms of SMEs’ human resource slack from perspective of product innovation, and takes SMEs in manufacturing industries as the samples to testify hypothesis promoted. It confirms that, unembedded human resource slack promote negative error management climate, and then reduce product innovation, while low-embeded human resource slack benefit product innovation and local searches play mediating role therein. It also find that executive shareholders can effect the action of unembedded human resource slack on innovation positively, while influence the ones of high-embedded human resource slack negatively. These conclusions confirm the heterogeneity and contextualization of human resource slack, and can provide some instruction for SMEs’ practice.

摘要： 中小企业经常缺乏规范和详尽的计划、制度及组织安排，而倾向于维持一定数量的冗员加以弥补，但是这种做法的有效性值得商榷。基于所拥有知识的特征，冗员可分为非嵌入型、低嵌入型和高嵌入型三类，他们各自发挥着怎样的作用尚需分类研究。从产品创新的角度分类剖析中小企业冗员的作用机理，并以制造业中小企业为样本证实：非嵌入型冗员催生消极的差错管理氛围，进而减少产品创新；低嵌入型冗员有利于中小企业产品创新，本地搜索中介二者间关系；高管持股比例正向调节非嵌入型冗员对产品创新的影响，而负向调节高嵌入型冗员的影响。这些结论在佐证冗员作用高异质性、高情境化特征的同时，也能为中小企业实践提供若干启示。