Human and organizational capital: typologies among Spanish firms

Abstract

This paper uses survey data on 965 Spanish manufacturing firms to examine the implementation of innovative management practices and the relationship of this with the organization of work and human resource management. The paper takes into account transformations in technology, quality management and the organization of work. Using cluster analysis, we identify the different paths that firms are following in order to improve their performance, finding that simultaneous transformations in several dimensions lead to greater success than partial transformation, or none at all.

Keywords:

• Organizational and human capital
• innovative management practices
• typologies
• Spain

Acknowledgements

This work has benefited from the financial support provided by the Fundación BBVA, under the project ‘Nuevos sistemas de organisación de la producción y del trabajo: su impacto sobre la competitividad de la empresa española’, and the Spanish Ministry of Education, under projects SEC2004–07530 ‘Innovación organisativa y resuttados de la empresa’ and SEC2001–2793 ‘Productividad y competitividad de la empresa industrial española’. The authors would also like to express their thanks to P. Osterman for his comments and suggestions on previous versions of this paper, as well as for his hospitality during the authors' visit to the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which allowed them to carry out this work.

Notes

1 This indicator has a high degree of reliability (Cronbach's α = 0.77). In addition, we have carried out a principal components analysis on the nine variables, which grouped them into a single factor that retains 42 per cent of the total variance.

2 We employed the agglomerative hierarchical procedure to create the clusters, prior to which all three variables were standardized. The distance employed was the cosine distance, with average linkage (inter-group). Results are robust to alternative linkage specifications.

3 A cluster composition analysis based on firm characteristics shows the first cluster to contain a higher proportion of plants owned by foreign multinationals. The percentages are 42 per cent in the first cluster, 27 per cent in the second, 19 per cent in the third and 16 per cent in the fourth. Average plant size in the group labelled dynamic, is also larger. Of the plants in the first cluster 37.6 per cent have more than 200 employees, vs. 26 per cent in the second, 20.6 per cent in the third and 12 per cent in the fourth. No significant differences can be observed in another relevant plant characteristic, which is plant age.

4 McIlroy et al. (2004), a recent study comparing five European regions, supports the theory of the slower evolution of Spanish firms. One of the five regions compared in this study is the Spanish region of Catalonia. Their data indicates that firms located in Catalonia present a rather weak association between a number of advanced work organization practices. Further, these firms lagged behind in terms of the implementation of team working, variations in working time and use of part-time employment. However, it has to be said that they rated relatively high in terms of functional or task flexibility.