How does Guanxi affect employees’ innovation behaviour? The role of knowledge acquisition and employees’ resilience

Purpose Guanxi is widespread in China’s traditional culture, affecting various behaviours of employees, yet existing literature has rarely paid attention to the impact mechanism of Guanxi on employees’ innovation behaviour. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of Guanxi, along with knowledge acquisition and employee’ resilience on employees’ innovation behaviour. Design/methodology/approach This research collected 268 samples from repatriates in Chinese multinational corporations and applied hierarchical multiple regression analyses and bootstrap approach to verify the hypotheses. Findings The results find that Guanxi has positive effect on knowledge acquisition and knowledge acquisition in further positively impact on exploitative and exploratory innovation behaviours. Moreover, knowledge acquisition plays a fully mediating role among Guanxi with exploitative and exploratory innovation behaviours and employees’ resilience moderates and strengthens the positive relationship between Guanxi and knowledge acquisition. Originality/value From the individual level, this study uncovers the relationship among Guanxi, knowledge acquisition and employees’ innovation behaviour and highlights the role of employees’ resilience in innovation behaviour.