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.