Abstract: with policy restrictions on it fast diminishing, private enterprises flourish while bring problems. The independent director system has become a new way in better governance and more resources, that has advantages of low cost, direct supervision and heterogeneous human resources. So whether independent director in private enterprise is effective and why? from the network embeddedness perspective, this article analyses the microprocess how the independent director deeply embedded in the internal network of his firm and empirically tests the relationship between their embedding degree and firm performance by listed companies’ data. Results below:①the significant negative correlation between independent directors’ proportion and corporate performance means that they restrict their firm development;②as few independent directors truly embed in the internal network completely due to their heterogeneity, the overall index describes the efficiency of independent directors group often is not related with corporate performance;③independent director’s individual Quality is better than their overall numbers. This study supports the judgment that independent director fails to work, just because independent directors right for their corporates are few and the majority do nothing.