Bridging Strategic Human Capital and Employee Entrepreneurship Research: A Labor Market Frictions Approach

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/sej.1264
• Author: David Kryscynski,Daniel M. Olson,Benjamin A. Campbell
• Published date: 01 September 2017
• Date: 01 September 2017

Bridging Strategic Human Capital and Employee

Entrepreneurship Research: A Labor Market

Frictions Approach

Benjamin A. Campbell,

1

*David Kryscynski,

2

and Daniel M. Olson

3

1

Department of Management and Human Resources, Fisher College of

Business, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

2

Department of Management, Marriott School of Management, Brigham

Young University, Provo, Utah

3

Department of Management and Organization, Foster School of Business,

University of Washington, Seattle, Washington

Research summary: Strategic human capital research sits at the intersection of strategy

and employee mobility research. Employee entrepreneurship research sits at the inter-

section of entrepreneurship and employee mobility research. We demonstrate how a shared

focus on labor market frictions connects these two complementary but largely disparate lit-

eratures through their mutual emphasis on employee mobility. Our examination of the impact

of various labor market frictions on employee mobility to competitor firms and employee

transitions to entrepreneurship suggests that the outcomes of some frictions are divergent

across the two literatures, the outcomes of some are aligned, and the outcomes of some are

ambiguous. The complex interplay of labor market frictions provides opportunities for future

research specifically exploring the intersection of the strategic human capital and employee

entrepreneurship literatures.

Managerial summary: Our research suggests that some factors that prevent employees

from leaving their employers to join competitor companies may also keep those employees

from leaving to start new companies. Other factors that prevent employees from leaving their

employers, however, may actually encourage employees to leave to start new companies. We

identify areas for future research to help us understand better when companies’efforts to

hold on to their workers are effective at preventing both movement to competitor companies

as well as to entrepreneurship. Copyright © 2017 Strategic Management Society.

The strategic human capital literature is largely

focused on explaining heterogeneity in perfor-

mance based on differences in firms’abilities to

leverage valuable human capital (Barney, 1991;

Barney & Wright, 1998; Castanias & Helfat,

1991). Accordingly, the strategic human capital lit-

erature brings from its strategy roots a focus on

firm performance heterogeneity and from its human

capital roots a focus on employee mobility.

1

In this

literature, mobility is viewed primarily as a threat

to firms because it represents the loss of valuable

human capital that might be important for firm cap-

abilities and performance (Coff, 1997). Thus, the

strategic human capital literature has emphasized

the critical role of labor market frictions in con-

straining mobility of human capital and, therefore,

facilitating sustained human capital-based competi-

tive advantages (Campbell, Coff, & Kryscynski,

2012; Chadwick, 2017).

Keywords: competitive advantage; entrepreneur; resource-

based view; spin-offs; human resource management; human

capital

*Correspondence to: Benjamin A. Campbell, Fisher College of

Business, The Ohio State University, 2100 Neil Ave #777,

Columbus, OH 43210. E-mail: campbell@fisher.osu.edu

1

For a recent review of the expansive literature on employee

mobility, please see Mawdsley and Somaya (2016).

Copyright © 2017 Strategic Management Society

Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal

Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 11: 344–356 (2017)

Published online 12 September 2017 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/sej.1264