Human Resource Configurations, Intellectual Capital, and Organizational Performance.

Throughout the past fifteen years researchers have examined the link between human resource (HR) activities and organizational-level performance. Many of the early studies in this area simply looked at the impacts of individual HR practices such as staffing, training, and compensation in isolation. More recent HR studies have tended to take a more holistic approach to HR by focusing on the impacts of systems or configurations of multiple HR activities (e.g., Huselid, 1995; MacDuffie, 1995; Youndt et al., 1996). While both of these lines of research have demonstrated that HR activities can have a positive influence on organizational value creation and performance, neither approach has given us a very clear…