Clarifying and empirically assessing the concept of human capital resource emergence

Abstract

The microfoundations agenda suggests that human capital resource emergence (HCRE) is an important aspect of understanding how individual human capital combines to form a valuable unit-level resource. We examine and clarify the definition of emergence as it relates to human capital resources that provide competitive advantage. Of particular strategic importance is the synergistic manner in which the value obtained from a given stock of individual human capital is amplified to generate outcomes that are greater than that which can be attributed to the underlying individual human capital parts. We empirically examine these synergistic effects among human capital to show how emergence of unit-level human capital resources can be inferred using multilevel contextual effects models. Our study uses a sample from Major League Baseball and provides evidence of this emergent effect. Specifically, we find that the association between human capital and performance emerges to the unit-level of analysis. In a robustness analysis, we find an emergent effect using an alternative multilevel modeling technique: Within and Between Analysis (WABA). Overall, our findings provide clarification and empirical support for the central notion of amplification in HCRE, thereby advancing knowledge on the important ways in which strategically valuable unit-level human capital resources emerge.

Keywords:

• Human capital resource emergence
• strategic human capital
• multilevel
• contextual effects

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express gratitude to the special issue editor, Yaping Gong, and anonymous reviewers for comments that substantially improved the paper. The authors would also like to thank Francis Yammarino for his suggestions and guidance associated with the use of within-and-between analysis (WABA) in this study. In a more general way, we also want to acknowledge our indebtedness to Dave Lepak for his contributions to the field of strategic human capital and encouragement of advancing multilevel perspectives associated with these essential firm resources. Dave was a great mentor, coauthor, and friend, and we are grateful that this paper is published in a special issue honoring him.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Basic background on the game of baseball is provided at the following website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/other_sports/baseball/3562135.stm

Additionally, an overview of the rules of MLB is provided at the following website: http://mlb.mlb.com/documents/0/8/0/268272080/2018_Official_Baseball_Rules.pdf

Lastly, a glossary of terms and common statistics associated with MLB is available at the following website: http://m.mlb.com/glossary

2 Only one pitcher can perform at a given time, thus making it difficult for there to be within-unit (among pitchers) task interdependencies. In general, pitchers can have task interdependencies with other fielders (Crocker & Eckardt, 2014). However, these would be between-unit task interdependencies and are not the theoretical or empirical focus of this study. Additionally, our performance measure and inclusion of control variables helped to eliminate the impact of task interdependencies pitchers may have with other defense players.