Developing and Deploying Organizational Capital in Services vs. Manufacturing

摘要

The present study employs intellectual capital and resource-based theories to investigate how the different characteristics of service and manufacturing firms influence the ability of these organizations to develop and use organizational capital. The approach suggests that as human activity becomes more central to the production process, greater variance brought on by such human involvement reduces a firm's ability to codify and therefore build organizational knowledge. The results from a survey of 122 manufacturing and 79 service organizations provide support for this view, showing that the level of organizational capital varies significantly between service and manufacturing firms, with manufacturers possessing a higher degree of organizational capital. In addition, the results are consistent with resource-based theory in that the greatest performance benefits from organizational capital were found to be in services, where such capital is the most difficult to build. Finally, the results show that organizational capital in service organizations allows these types of firms to increase the effectiveness of their human capital.