Thermoelectric material is a kind of key material for green energy conversion and thermoelectric thechnology application. It meets bottleneck for thermoelectric material due to mutual restriction among thermoelectric properties. It provides a clear idea for the next generation of thermoelectric materials development that the material designs about microstructure collaboratively adjust thermoelectric properties. The new concepts improving the thermoelectric properties are introduced in this paper, such as "multi-scale hierarchical architecture", "electronic crystals and ionic liquid ", "lattice defect engineering", "mosaic crystal" and "anharmonic vibration". The effect of some physic and chemical process ( such as energy band adjusting, weak bond, non harmonic vibration, Nano-domain scattering, spinal decomposition, energy filtering mechanism and phase transformation) on thermoelectric transport behave are adequately decribed. The effects of microstructure parameters (such as point defect, line defect, grain boundary, nano domain and second phase) adjusting on physical parameters (such as band structure, carrier free path and lattice vibration mode) are discussed in details. The development of the next generation high performance bulk thermoelectric materials is described on the basis of current status.