Abstract: The performance of village cadres is related to the level of comprehensive revitalization of villages, which has long attracted extensive attention from the theoretical and practical circles,but few studies have conducted in-depth investigations from the perspective of village social capital.Based on the survey data of Shaanxi, Henan and Hebei, we empirically analyze the effects of village social capital and its dimensions on the performance of village cadres using a seemingly unrelated regression model, and verify the mediating effects of management ability, intrinsic motivation and government support with the help of a mediating effect model. It found that（1）village social capital, village identity, and village trust significantly enhance village cadres’ job performance, task performance, and neighborhood performance; village network significantly improves village cadres’ job performance and neighborhood performance, but has no significant effect on task performance, and the robustness test and endogeneity analysis still support the above conclusions;（2） Mechanism analysis shows that village social capital improves village cadres’ job performance through three channels: the ability selection mechanism that effectively identifies highcapacity village cadres, the motivation incentive mechanism that stimulates the intrinsic motivation of village cadres, and the government guarantee mechanism that seeks government support;（3）The descending order of mediating effects intensity is: government support, intrinsic motivation,and management ability. Accordingly, great importance should be attached to examining the peripheral performance of village cadres, actively utilizing and correctly guiding social capital in the village area, and at the same time adequately unblocking the intermediary mechanism of social capital in the village area to enhance work performance.