Barney’s presentation of the resource-based view (RBV) profoundly shaped the trajectory of management scholarship. This article considers the RBV’s impact specifically on the field of strategic human ...capital resources. Although Barney is still highly relevant, I suggest that research has not sufficiently appreciated the role that individual and collective performance behavior and outcomes play in linking human capital resources to competitive advantage. An alternative, what might be called RBV2.0, posits that research needs to recognize that human capital resources are distinct from performance behavior and outcomes. Such an observation raises the question, “Resources for what?” Answering this question leads to several important insights. First, a given type of human capital resource is only important to the extent it is related to performance behavior and outcomes that contribute to competitive advantage. Second, performance behavior is largely strategy-specific and thus firm-specific. Third, firm specificity is not a characteristic of human capital resources but rather a function of the proximity of the resource to firm-specific performance behavior and outcomes. Consequently, “Performance” is the answer to the question, “Resources for what?” This emphasis on understanding human capital resource-performance relationships adds considerable precision into the RBV, helps resolve puzzles in the strategic human capital literature relating to firm specificity and performance mobility, and promotes a deeper understanding hiding latent within Barney’s original view.
The purpose of this article is to present cutting-edge research on issues relating to the theory, design, and analysis of change. Rather than a highly technical review, our goal is to provide ...management scholars with a relatively nontechnical single source useful for helping them develop and evaluate longitudinal research. Toward that end, we provide readers with “checklists” of issues to consider when theorizing and designing a longitudinal study. We also discuss the trade-offs among analytic strategies (repeated measures general linear model, random coefficient modeling, and latent growth modeling), circumstances in which such methods are most appropriate, and ways to analyze data when one is using each approach.
This study integrates research from strategy, economics, and applied psychology to examine how organizations may leverage their human resources to enhance firm performance and competitive advantage. ...Staffing and training are key human resource management practices used to achieve firm performance through acquiring and developing human capital resources. However, little research has examined whether and why staffing and training influence firm-level financial performance (profit) growth under different environmental (economic) conditions. Using 359 firms with over 12 years of longitudinal firm-level profit data, we suggest that selective staffing and internal training directly and interactively influence firm profit growth through their effects on firm labor productivity, implying that staffing and training contribute to the generation of slack resources that help buffer and then recover from the effects of the Great Recession. Further, internal training that creates specific human capital resources is more beneficial for prerecession profitability, but staffing is more beneficial for postrecession recovery, apparently because staffing creates generic human capital resources that enable firm flexibility and adaptation. Thus, the theory and findings presented in this article have implications for the way staffing and training may be used strategically to weather economic uncertainty (recession effects). They also have important practical implications by demonstrating that firms that more effectively staff and train will outperform competitors throughout all pre- and postrecessionary periods, even after controlling for prior profitability.
Microfoundations have received increased attention in strategy and organization theory over the past decade. In this paper, we take stock of the microfoundations movement, its origins and history, ...and disparate forms. We briefly touch on similar micro movements in disciplines such as economics and sociology. However, our particular focus is on the unique features of the microfoundations movement in macro management. While the microfoundations movement in macro management does seek to link with more micro disciplines such as psychology and organizational behavior, it also features a unique set of questions, assumptions, theoretical mechanisms, and independent/dependent variables that complement the focus in the micro disciplines. We also discuss the disparate criticisms of the microfoundations literature and the challenges the movement faces, such as defining distinct theoretical and empirical programs for microfoundational research. The overall purpose of this manuscript is to clearly delineate the promise and uniqueness of microfoundations research in macro management, to discuss how the movement originated and where it is going, and to offer rich opportunities for future work.
Modern organizations struggle with staffing challenges stemming from increased knowledge work, labor shortages, competition for applicants, and workforce diversity. Yet, despite such critical needs ...for effective staffing practice, staffing research continues to be neglected or misunderstood by many organizational decision makers. Solving these challenges requires staffing scholars to expand their focus from individual-level recruitment and selection research to multilevel research demonstrating the business unit/organizational-level impact of staffing. Toward this end, this review provides a selective and critical analysis of staffing best practices covering literature from roughly 2000 to the present. Several research-practice gaps are also identified.
A century of selection Ryan, Ann Marie; Ployhart, Robert E
Annual review of psychology,
01/2014, Letnik:
65
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Over 100 years of psychological research on employee selection has yielded many advances, but the field continues to tackle controversies and challenging problems, revisit once-settled topics, and ...expand its borders. This review discusses recent advances in designing, implementing, and evaluating selection systems. Key trends such as expanding the criterion space, improving situational judgment tests, and tackling socially desirable responding are discussed. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which technology has substantially altered the selection research and practice landscape. Other areas where practice lacks a research base are noted, and directions for future research are discussed.
Social media are a broad collection of digital platforms that have radically changed the way people interact and communicate. However, we argue that social media are not simply a technology but ...actually represent a context that differs in important ways from traditional (e.g., face-to-face) and other digital (e.g., email) ways of interacting and communicating. As a result, social media is a relatively unexamined type of context that may affect the cognition, affect, and behavior of individuals within organizations. We propose a contextual framework that identifies the discrete and ambient stimuli that distinguish social media contexts from digital communication media (e.g., email) and physical (e.g., face-to-face) contexts. We then use this contextual framework to demonstrate how it changes more person-centered theories of organizational behavior (e.g., social exchange, social contagion, and social network theories). These theoretical insights are also used to identify a number of practical implications for individuals and organizations. This study's major contribution is creating a theoretical understanding of social media features so that future research may proceed in a theory-based, rather than platform-based, manner. Overall, we intend for this article to stimulate and broadly shape the direction of research on this ubiquitous, but poorly understood, phenomenon.
This paper introduces a radically different conceptualization of human capital resources that runs counter to the individual-level approaches that have dominated human capital theory for the last 50 ...years. We leverage insights from economics, strategy, human resources, and psychology to develop an integrated and holistic framework that defines the structure, function, levels, and combinations of human capital resources. This multidisciplinary framework redefines human capital resources as individual or unit-level capacities based on individual knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) that are accessible for unit-relevant purposes. The framework and definition offer three broad contributions. First, multidisciplinary communication is facilitated by providing precise definitions and distinctions between individual differences, KSAOs, human capital, human capital resources, and strategic human capital resources. Second, given that human capital resources originate in individuals’ KSAOs, multiple distinct types of human capital resources exist at individual and collective levels, and these types are much more diverse than the historical generic-specific distinction. Third, the multiple types of human capital resources may be combined within and across levels, via processes of emergence and complementarity. Consequently, the locus of competitive advantage has less to do with whether human capital resources are generic or specific but instead occurs because nearly all human capital resource combinations are complex, are firm-specific, and lack strategic (or efficient) factor markets. Overall, the proposed multidisciplinary framework opens new avenues for future research that challenge the prevailing literature’s treatment of human capital resources.
This study integrates research on newcomer socialization and work teams to examine how the team environment facilitates or hinders the translation of human capital into newcomer performance in ...professional sports teams. Using large, multiyear and multilevel data from the top five European professional football leagues, we examine how individual-level newcomer human capital and the team-level characteristics (prior team performance, number of newcomers) influence individual newcomer performance during two different socialization contexts (when more vs. less time for socialization is provided). We found that individual human capital was positively related to newcomer performance across socialization contexts while the direct relationships between team variables and performance were conditional on the socialization context. Prior team performance was positively related to newcomer performance when more time for socialization was provided, but prior team performance as well as the number of newcomers were negatively related to newcomer performance when less time for socialization was provided. Beyond the direct relationships, our results show that human capital was less positively related to newcomer performance when newcomers joined higher performing teams across socialization contexts. These findings extend our understanding of the complex relationships between individual human capital and the team's socialization environment on newcomer performance and advance new knowledge regarding conditions that facilitate the success of newcomers who join existing (operating) teams.
