Competitive strategy, strategic human capital and sustained competitive advantage

Abstract

With economic globalization, facing increasingly fierce competition, more and more companies draw keen focus on how human capital can successfully promote the implementation of firm strategic objectives. Thus, how strategic human capital as corporate strategic resources enables enterprises to gain sustained competitive advantage is getting more and more concerns by more scholars. Based on the resource-based view of the firm and strategic human resource management theory, this paper puts forward the construct of `strategy human capital'. Through the survey of questionnaires responded by human resources managers and general managers in 105 companies in China, it makes an accurate and direct measurement of firms' strategic human capital, and examines the data by hierarchical regression analysis. The results show that the interaction of different human resource management systems and different competitive strategies have different influences on sustained competitive advantage. Meanwhile, different configures of strategic human capital play different intermediary roles in different human resources systems interacting with the competitive strategy on sustained competitive advantage.