Abstract: As the principal part of the market-oriented economy, the state-owned enterprises are focused on the issue of how to keep their own advantages in the context of globalization. The enterprise competitiveness can not only reflect the future development of an enterprise, but also an important embodiment of a nation’s overall economic strength. This paper firstly chooses the A-share state-owned listed companies in SSE and SZSE between 2013 and 2015 as research samples to empirically examine the relationship between the management background characteristics and the enterprise competitiveness, and then it verifies the regulatory effect of the incentive mechanism by introducing the two kinds of incentive methods: cash incentive and stoke option incentive. The findings show that when the size, the average age and the proportion of male managers are bigger, and the education level is higher, the management will have a more obvious competitive advantage, and the enterprise competitiveness will be stronger. Meanwhile, the cash incentive mechanism in the compensation incentives has a significant positive regulatory effect, but the regulatory effect of the share option incentive is hard to be given full play.

Key words: management background characteristics; competitive advantage; cash incentive; stock option incentive; enterprise competitiveness