Toward A More Comprehensive Model of Firms' Human Capital Rents

Strategic human capital research has recently expanded to encompass other types of labor market frictions in addition to those posed by firm-specific human capital. Labor market frictions inhibit trade in human capital, allowing firms that are idiosyncratically advantaged with respect to a particular friction to appropriate human capital rents. Adding to this nascent conversation, I describe how idiosyncratic firm resources and capabilities enable firms to garner human capital rents. By explicitly distinguishing between value creation and value capture, which together drive firm-level human capital rents, this article’s theoretical framework uncovers overlooked circumstances where firms’ pursuit of human capital rents differ in important ways. I discuss theoretic propositions and implications to guide future research

Examining Non-Linear Relationships between Human Resource Practices and Manufacturing Performance

Copyright by Cornell University. This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://ilr.sagepub.com.One little-explored question concerning innovative human resources practices is how the intensity of their implementation affects their impact on establishment performance: is the relationship linear, or more complex? This analysis, using U.S. Census Bureau data for 1997 from a sample of 1,212 private sector manufacturing establishments, investigates the possibility of non-linearities in the relationship between establishment performance and six human resource practices. The author finds departures from linearity that are both statistically significant and substantively meaningful for four of the six practices. He concludes that linear estimations of these relationships could mislead theorists and result in faulty recommendations to practitioners

Examining Non-Linear Relationships between Human Resource Practices and Manufacturing Performance

One little-explored question concerning innovative human resources practices is how the intensity of their implementation affects their impact on establishment performance: is the relationship linear, or more complex? This analysis, using U.S. Census Bureau data for 1997 from a sample of 1,212 private sector manufacturing establishments, investigates the possibility of non-linearities in the relationship between establishment performance and six human resource practices. The author finds departures from linearity that are both statistically significant and substantively meaningful for four of the six practices. He concludes that linear estimations of these relationships could mislead theorists and result in faulty recommendations to practitioners

IT PAYS TO VALUE FAMILY: WORK AND FAMILY TRADEOFFS RECONSIDERED

We use longitudinal data to assess whether individuals who place greater importance on marriage and family pay a price for that priority in subsequent labor market success. Male respondents placing a high priority on marriage and family before entering the labor market earn more, a finding contrary to behavioral research on work and family but consistent with the economics literature. Female respondents who place a high priority on marriage and family, however, do not appear to suffer in terms of subsequent earnings, a finding contrary to most previous research. While a good family life makes demands that may take away from individuals' work achievements, poor family life may interfere more with workplace success

The Effect of Employee-Oriented HRM on Employee Downsizing Following Mergers & Acquisitions

Firms have increasingly engaged in Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) activities in recent years. A common strategy following M&A is employee downsizing that aims at achieving strategic goals and enhancing performance. This approach, however, raises concerns from a strategic human resource management (HRM) perspective. Research suggests that downsizing may breach employees\u27 psychological contracts and hinder the development of firm-specific human capital. While this viewpoint has an intuitive appeal, we reconsider it by suggesting that, in the M&A context wherein employees expect significant organizational changes, downsizing does not necessarily lead employees to negative reactions. Instead, if acquiring firms have strong employee-oriented HRM policies and continue to adopt similar policies after the acquisition, employees may interpret downsizing as a strategic managerial action to facilitate organizational changes. Using a representative sample of 5,338 firm-year observations from 1,174 U.S. publicly traded firms between 2002 and 2018, we found that both pre-acquisition investment in employee-oriented HRM policies and the post-acquisition adoption of such policies by acquiring firms positively moderate the negative relationship between employee downsizing following M&A and labor productivity. We discuss the implications of these findings for both research and practice