Abstract This study demonstrates the positive effects of relational input from emotional perspectives of trust, commitment and identification, discusses its crowding-out effect on firm’s productive activities based on external constraints and political pressure, and analyzes the moderating effect from both property right structure and poverty scale. The conclusions are as follows: ①there is an inverted u-shaped relationship between relational input and firm’s performance, namely moderate investment in relational input helps firm to obtain trust, commitment and acknowledgment of stakeholders, and improve its performance. But excessive dependence on this non-market strategy will generate negative effect on corporate performance by exerting too much pressure;②the nature of property right and poverty scale serve as significant moderators between relational input and performance. That is, private governance and previous poverty scale will weaken the inverted U effect of relational input on firm’s performance.
