The Impact of Performance Aspiration Surplus on Corporate Innovation Activity: The Moderating Effects of Managers' Risk Traits and Competitive Threats

In the pursuit of industry leadership, innovation activity is considered a crucial driver for high-performing enterprises to transcend to industry leaders. By selecting listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share markets from 2010 to 2022 as the research object, this paper explores the impact of performance aspiration surplus on corporate innovation activity and its boundary conditions. The results show that performance aspiration surplus has an inverted U-shaped relationship with corporate innovation activity; managers' risk traits and competitive threats respectively strengthen and weaken this inverted U-shaped relationship. This paper expands the research boundaries of the impact of performance aspirations on corporate innovation, enriches the application of social comparison theory in the Chinese context, and provides new insights for continuously stimulating corporate innovation vitality.