This Article Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Chadwick, C. Articles by Dabu, A. Search for Related Content

Human Resources, Human Resource Management, and the Competitive Advantage of Firms: Toward a More Comprehensive Model of Causal Linkages

Management and Marketing Department, University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, Alabama 35899
Department of Management and Human Resources, HEC School of Management, Paris, 78351 Jouy-en-Josas, France
clint.chadwick{at}uah.edu
dabu{at}hec.fr

We maintain that human resources are strategically significant in at least three cases, when these resources (1) help create traditional Ricardian rents; (2) function as components of organizational capabilities that generate nontraditional Ricardian rents; and (3) are the source of technological and managerial innovations that produce entrepreneurial rents. Human resource management (HRM) activities, on the other hand, assume strategic significance by supporting the three cases above through a process that we call managerial entrepreneurship. Furthermore, HRM takes on different forms when supporting each of these types of rents. Hence, this rent-based view has greater potential to help explain the contribution of human resources to firms' competitive advantages than approaches that are grounded in the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm, which primarily reflects the Ricardian view of rents. Moreover, a rent-based approach suggests fruitful new ways to address many of the theoretic challenges confronting the strategic human resource management (SHRM) literature.

Key Words: strategic HRM; rent theories; resource-based view; entrepreneurship; dynamic capabilities

This article has been cited by other articles:

				J. Kraaijenbrink, J.-C. Spender, and A. J. Groen The Resource-Based View: A Review and Assessment of Its Critiques Journal of Management, January 1, 2010; 36(1): 349 - 372. [Abstract] [PDF]