Abstract
Academic institutions like other business organizations strive to achieve, maintain, and sustain their competitive advantages. In this study, we examined the influence of the “strategic human resources management (HRM) practices” on the achievement of “competitive advantages” that will be sustainable, with an evaluation of the mediating role of “human capital” development, and the commitment of employees in an academic environment. Six hundred questionnaires were randomly distributed to the employees of selected universities in Erbil City of Iraq. Structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques were employed for the analysis with the use of Smart Partial Least Square PLS. Findings from our study revealed a linear and positive influence of the strategic HRM on the sustainability of “competitive advantages”; strategic HRM was also found to positively influence human capital development and the commitment of employees to the institutions; the influence of both human capital development and employees’ commitment were found to have a partial mediation in the strategic HRM practices and sustainable competitive advantage (SCA) relationship. Finally, theoretical and management implications were suggested.
Highlights
In the dynamic and competitive business world of today, where the exchange of ideas is proficient, a “sustainable competitive advantage” (SCA) is no longer deep-rooted in the organization’s physical resources but in the organization’s nonphysical human resources [1,2]
The combination of resource-based view (RBV) and behavioral theories to examine the mediating role of human capital development and “employee commitment” in this study proposed that strategic human resources management (HRM) practices will contribute to an organization’s competitive advantage with an effective management of human capita, its development, and “employee commitment”
The technique was in line with Petter [74], who posited that PLS-Structural equation modeling (SEM) is efficient for prediction by reducing the explained variance in the dependent variables, most especially when the data are in contrast to the normality assumption and certain important regressors are excluded from the model
Summary
In the dynamic and competitive business world of today, where the exchange of ideas is proficient, a “sustainable competitive advantage” (SCA) is no longer deep-rooted in the organization’s physical resources but in the organization’s nonphysical human resources [1,2]. In view of these findings, the attention of scholars has been on the factors that could be instrumental to the achievement of SCA. It is on this note that other scholars have attempted to understand the particular factors that could enable an organization to achieve SCA. Barney [5] investigated the relationship between SCA and organizational resources and found that every organization operates with a tacit knowledge and has the potential to improve, SCA
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