New HRM Practices, Complementarities, and the Impact on Innovation Performance

Keld Laursen () and Nicolai Foss ()

No 00-5, IVS/CBS Working Papers from Department of Industrial Economics and Strategy, Copenhagen Business School

Abstract: Although organisational structure has sometimes been mentioned in evolutionary economics as well as in the innovation literature as a possible determinant of innovation performance, very little systematic theoretical and empirical work exist on this issue. In this paper, we take our theoretical point of departure in recent work in organisational economics and elsewhere, on systems of human resource management practices. We put and develop the argument that just as complementarities between new HRM practices positively influence financial performance, they will also positively influence innovation performance. We examine this overall hypothesis by estimating an empirical model of innovation performance, using data from a Danish survey of 1900 business firms. Using principal components analysis we identify two HRM systems which are conducive to innovation. The first is one in which all of our nine HRM variables matter (almost) equally for the ability to innovate. The second system, which is found to be conducive to innovation is dominated by performance related pay and to some extent by firm-internal training. Of our total of nine sectors we find that the four manufacturing sectors correlate with the first system, while also firms located in ICT intensive service sectors are associated with the first system. Firms belonging to the wholesale trade sector tend to be associated with the second system.

Keywords: Innovation; human resource management practices; organisational complementarities; evolutionary economics. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C25 D23 O32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://ep.lib.cbs.dk/download/ISBN/8778690552.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to ep.lib.cbs.dk:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ivs:iivswp:00-5

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IVS/CBS Working Papers from Department of Industrial Economics and Strategy, Copenhagen Business School
Bibliographic data for series maintained by J. Petur Joensen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).